Jonathan Schell was born in Manhattan, New York on August 21, 1943. He received a bachelor's degree in Far Eastern history from Harvard University and spent a year studying Japanese at the International Christian University in Tokyo. In 1967, while heading home from his year abroad in Japan, he stopped in Vietnam, where he witnessed Operation Cedar Falls, an aerial campaign designed to level Ben Suc, which was known as a Vietcong stronghold. This experience led to his first book The Village of Ben Suc. His other non-fiction works include The Fate of the Earth, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, The Unfinished Twentieth Century, The Unconquerable World, and The… Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1967 to 1987. He also worked as a columnist for Newsday and New York Newsday and as a correspondent for The Nation. He taught at numerous universities including Yale, Princeton, Wesleyan, and N.Y.U. He died of cancer on March 25, 2014 at the age of 70.
Mark Strand was born on April 11, 1934 in Summerside on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Since his father's job resulted in many transfers, he spent his childhood in Cleveland, Halifax, Montreal, New York and Philadelphia and his teenage years in Colombia, Mexico and Peru. He received a bachelor's degree at Antioch College in Ohio in 1957, a bachelor of fine arts in painting from Yale University School of Art and Architecture in 1959, and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1962. He studied 19th-century Italian poetry in Florence on a Fulbright Grant from 1960-1961. His first poetry collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open, was published in 1964. His other works included… Reasons for Moving, Darker, The Story of Our Lives, The Late Hour, A Continuous Life, Dark Harbor, and Collected Poems: Mark Strand. In 1990, he was named the fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. He received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One. In 1980, he felt that he had reached an impasse and stopped writing poetry for several years. During that time, he wrote several children's books including The Planet of Lost Things and Mr. and Mrs. Baby. He also wrote books on the painters EdwardHopper and William Bailey, and a collection of critical essays entitled The Art of the Real. He died of liposarcoma on November 29, 2014 at the age of 80.