David R. Slavitt was born in White Plains, New York in 1935. He received an AB and an MA from Columbia University. After graduating from college and beginning a Ph.D., he worked as a movie critic for Newsweek from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. During this time, he published his first book of poetry, Suits for the Dead. His first novel, Rochelle, or Virtue Rewarded, was published in 1966. He has written about 100 works of fiction, poetry, and poetry and drama in translation including Alice at 80, The Cock Book, Falling from Silence: Poems, The Latin Odes of Jean Dorat, Milton's Latin Poems, and Three Greenlandic Poets. He also writes under the names David Benjamin, Henry Lazarus,… Lynn Meyer, and Henry Sutton. As Henry Sutton, he has written less "literary" works that have sold well such as The Exhibitionist and The Sacrifice: A Novel of the Occult.
Kenneth McLeish was born in Glasgow, Scotland on October 10, 1940. He studied music and the classics at Worcester College, Oxford University. Before becoming a full-time author and translator in 1975, he worked as a teacher. He wrote and edited literary guides and cultural companions. His works included Theatre of Aristophanes, Penguin Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century, Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, Myth, Guide to Greek Drama, and The Pocket Guide to Shakespeare. He also wrote Listeners' Guide to Classical Music with his wife. He translated all 47 of the surviving classical Greek plays as well as individual plays by other playwrights. He also… wrote a number of original plays and filmscripts including Orpheus and Vice at the Vicarage and adapted The Oresteia with Frederic Raphael for a BBC Television production entitled The Serpent's Tongue. He died on November 28, 1997 at the age of 57.