Harry Sinclair Lewis, (1885–1951) the son of a country doctor, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. After graduating from Yale in 1907, he went to New York, tried freelance work for a time, and then worked in a variety of editorial positions from the East Coast to California. Main Street (1920) was his first successful novel. In the decade that followed, Lewis published four other acclaimed novels of social criticism: Babbitt (1922); Arrowsmith (1925), for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; Elmer Gantry (1927); and Dodsworth (1929). In 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write novels and plays for another two decades and published his last work, World So Wide (1951), shortly before his death in Rome.
 
Sally E. Parry is Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, and Director of General Education at Illinois State University. She is currently the Executive Director of the Sinclair Lewis Society and editor of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter. She has edited two collections of short stories by Sinclair Lewis, Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (2005) and The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis (2005), and written, with Robert L. McLaughlin, We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II (2006).

Azar Nafisi is the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Things I've Been Silent About, and The Republic of Imagination. She has taught at Oxford and several universities in Iran, and is currently a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced Interantional Relations. Her work has been translated into thirty-two langauages.