George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. His works include the poem-novel, Whylah Falls (1990), the narrative lyric sequence, Execution Poems (2001), and the verse-play and opera, Beatrice Chancy (1999).

• Morris, George P. Poems. New York: Charles Scribner, 1860.
• --. The Deserted Bride and Other Poems. New York: Adlard & Saunders, 1838.
• --. The Whip-poor-will. 1843.

Born November 15, 1881, Franklin P. Adams worked for forty years as a leading New York newspaper daily columnist and wit penning light verse and a weekly diary that amused a large and literate audience. A few years after graduating from the Armour Scientific Academy in Chicago in 1899, Adams first entered journalism in Chicago.

William Knox was born August 17, 1789, in Lillieslief, Roxburghshire, and educated there and at Loretto Academy in Musselburgh. He took up farming from his parents but abandoned it for journalism, and especially poetry.

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was born in Leeds on July 21, 1865. He was among the most acerbic men of letters and journalists of his lifetime. An anti-Scottish Tory and Monarchist, a Methodist, Crosland earned his living as a Fleet Street reviewer, critic, and editor for journals like The Outlook, The Academy, and the Penny Illustrated Paper.

Born June 3, 1771, Sydney Smith was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he took a B.A. in 1792 and an M.A. in 1796. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1796 and became a curate in Nether Avon, near Amesbury. Moving to Edinburgh as a tutor, Smith published his first book of sermons and married Catharine Amelia Pybus.

Charles William Shirley Brooks was born on 29 April, 1816 at 52 Doughty Street, London. The son of Elizabeth and William Brooks (an architect), he was articled to his uncle Charles Sabine of Oswestry after receiving his early education. In 1938, he passed the Incorporated Law Society's examination, but there is no record of Brooks becoming a solicitor.