Elting Elmore Morison (December 14, 1909, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – April 20, 1995, Peterborough, New Hampshire) was an American historian of technology, military biographer, author of nonfiction books, and essayist. He was an MIT professor and the founder of MIT's Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program.
Arthur Hill Cash (February 4, 1922 – December 29, 2016) was an American scholar of 18th-century English literature.Cash is best known as the author of the definitive two-volume biography of Laurence Sterne, published between 1975 and 1986. He also wrote a popular biography of the 18th-century politician John Wilkes, who was influential in developing ideas concerning civil liberties in England and the United States. The book, titled John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, was one of three finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Cash taught university literature courses for forty-five years, including popular classes in the Bible and Greek and Roman literature. He retired from the State University of New York at New Paltz as one of a handful of faculty with the title of Distinguished Professor. Before that he taught at the University of Colorado, the University of New Mexico, and Colorado State University.
Cash was born in Gary, Indiana, and lived in or near Chicago for many years. Starting work as a stage actor, at the beginning of American involvement in the Second World War, he joined the 108th General Hospital unit. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, and completed his graduate education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Columbia University.
He married Dorothy Moore Cash (later Romni Cash) and they had two children before their divorce. Their eldest son was killed in El Salvador in 1992. He married novelist Mary Gordon and they had two children together, now adults.
Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was an American/Canadian literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel.The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority on the life and works of Henry James." His work on James won him both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
Heinrich Eduard Jacob (7 October 1889 – 25 October 1967) was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.
Francis Marion ("Frank") Gibbons (April 10, 1921 – July 16, 2016) was the secretary to the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 1970 to 1986 and a church general authority from 1986 until 1991.A native of St. Johns, Arizona, Gibbons received degrees from Stanford University and the University of Utah and practiced law in Utah for eighteen years. In 1970, Gibbons was hired as the secretary to the First Presidency to replace Joseph Anderson, who had been the secretary since 1922 but who had become an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.Gibbons served as secretary to the First Presidency until March 1986, when he retired and was succeeded by F. Michael Watson. One week later, at the church's April general conference, Gibbons was called as a general authority and member of the First Quorum of the Seventy. In April 1989, he was transferred to the newly created Second Quorum of the Seventy.In October 1991, Gibbons was honorably released from service in the Second Quorum of the Seventy and as a general authority of the church.Gibbons also served in the church as a bishop, stake president and patriarch. He is the author of 20 books, including a biography of Jack Anderson and the hagiographical Prophets of God series about the presidents of the LDS Church.Gibbons was married to Helen Bay and they are the parents of four children.
Edwin A. "Bud" Shrake, Jr. (September 6, 1931 – May 8, 2009) was an American journalist, sportswriter, novelist, biographer and screenwriter. He co-wrote a series of golfing advice books with golf coach Harvey Penick, including Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, a golf guide that became the best-selling sports book in publishing history. Called a “lion of Texas letters” by the Austin American-Statesman, Shrake was a member of the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and received the Lon Tinkle lifetime achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Book Festival Bookend Award.
Ellis Edward Amburn (2 August 1933 – 18 August 2018) was an American book editor and biographer.
Julian Hawthorne (June 22, 1846 – July 14, 1934) was an American writer and journalist, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mysteries and detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies, and histories.
James Thomas Flexner (January 13, 1908 – February 13, 2003) was an American historian and biographer best known for the four-volume biography of George Washington that earned him a National Book Award
in Biography and a special Pulitzer Prize. His one-volume abridgment, Washington: the Indispensable Man (1974) was the basis of two television miniseries, George Washington (1984) and George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (1986), starring Barry Bostwick as Washington.
Stefan Lorant (Hungarian: Lóránt István; February 22, 1901, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary – November 14, 1997, in Rochester, Minnesota) was a pioneering Hungarian-American filmmaker, photojournalist, and author.