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William Cornelius Sullivan joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a special agent in 1941. Following the war, he served in a series of administrative posts. He was appointed the head of intelligence operations in 1961. Sullivan was forced into retirement due to a dispute with J. Edgar Hoover in 1971. Both during and following his time at the Bureau, Sullivan was an outspoken critic of Hoover's policies and abuse of power within the FBI. Sullivan was viewed as an intellectual and an expert on the Communist Party in the United States. Sullivan died in 1977 of an accidental gunshot wound while hunting. He was married with three children.

Jacob Abbott was born in Hallowell, Maine, on November 14, 1803. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1820. He studied at Andover Theological Seminary from 1821 to 1824. Abbott taught at Amherst College from 1825-1829, before founding the Mount Vernon School for Young Ladies in Boston in 1829. He also founded Abbott's Institute in 1843 and the Mount Vernon School for Boys in 1845. In addition to his work in education, Abbott was licensed to preach by the Hampshire Association of the Congregational Church, and was the pastor of the Eliot Congregational Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Abbott was the author of juvenile fiction and religious books, authoring one hundred and eighty books during his career. The most popular were his "Rollo" series. Abbott married Harriet Vaughan in 1829 and had four sons: Benjamin, Edward, Austin, and Lyman. He died in Farmington, Maine, in 1879.

Logan Pearsall Smith was born October 18, 1865 in Millville, New Jersey. His parents, Robert Pearsall Smith (1827-1898) and Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911), were prominent Quaker evangelists. He had two sisters: Alys Pearsall Smith, suffrage activist and first wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell, and art historian Mary Berenson. Smith attended the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, Haverford College, Harvard College, and the University of Berlin, before graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1891. Smith remained in England after graduating, and became a British subject in 1913. For most of his life he resided in Chelsea, sharing a home with his mother and his sister Alys. While popular in British literary and social circles, Smith never married. He died in London on March 2, 1946, at the age of 80 years old.

A "man of letters," Smith published his first book, "The Youth of Parnassus and Other Stories" in 1895. He followed this work with three issues of a review entitled "The Golden Urn," printed in 1897 and 1898. His first book of aphorisms, "Trivia," was privately printed in 1902, and republished in 1918. Subsequent volumes of "More Trivia" and "Afterthoughts" were published in 1921 and 1931, respectively. Other works by Smith include "The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton" (1907), "The English Language" (1912), "Words and Idioms" (1925), "The Prospects of Literature" (1927), "On Reading Shakespeare" (1933), "Reperusals and Re-Collections" (1936), the autobiographical "Unforgotten Years" (1938), "Milton and His Critics" (1940), and "A Religious Rebel" (published posthumously, 1949), an edited volume of his mother's letters. Smith also edited several anthologies. In 1919, Smith founded the Society for Pure English with poet Robert Bridges, and penned several tracts for that group.