Rose Strunsky was born in Russia in 1884. Her family emigrated to the United States, first to New York City and then to San Francisco, where she attended Stanford University. Along with her older sister, Anna Strunsky, she was active in socialist politics and San Francisco's literary scene. The sisters travelled in Russia in 1905, and lived in Greenwich Village in New York in the 1910s. Rose Strunsky married Louis Lorwin in 1920. Throughout her life she worked as a translator; her translations include The Journal of Leo Tolstoi (Knopf, 1917) and Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (International Publishers, 1925). Rose Strunsky Lorwin died in New York in 1963.

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre Minnesota in 1885. After graduating from Yale University in 1908, Lewis worked as a freelance writer, reporter and editor in various towns before working as an editor in New York. His first commercially successful novel, Main Street, was published in 1920. In 1926, Lewis was awarded a Pulizter Prize, which he refused. He accepted a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. Lewis's novels include Babbit (1922) and Elmer Gantry (1927). Lewis died in 1951 in Rome.