Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City in 1924. At 17 he was drafted into the Army, and took part in the Normandy invasion. After the war, he attended Lincoln University (PA) and Wayne State in Detroit, then returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he died in 1983. He is also the author of The Bern Book.

Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, cultural critic, and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Harvard. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. He was the recipient of the 2022 Whiting Award for his collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?. His recent book, The Blue Period, establishes Such Sweet Thunder as a work to be read and taught alongside James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.