Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) grew up in Wisconsin, but moved to France with his companion Monroe Wheeler in 1925. Wescott's early fiction, notably the stories in Goodbye, Wisconsin and the novel The Grandmothers (in which Alwyn Tower, the narrator of The Pilgrim Hawk, makes his first appearance), were set in his native Midwest. Later work included essays on political, literary, and spiritual subjects, as well as the novels The Pilgrim Hawk and Apartment in Athens (also available as an NYRB Classic). Wescott's journals, recording his many literary and artistic friendships and offering an intimate view of his life as a gay man, were published posthumously under the title Continual Lessons.

Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award), and, most recently, The Snow Queen. He is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.