Jalal Al-e Ahmad was born to a clerical religious family in Tehran in 1923. A teacher all his life, he joined the Communist Tudeh Party in 1943 and quickly rose through its ranks, becoming a member of the party committee for Tehran, before breaking with the Tudeh in 1947 in protest over Soviet influence. Al-e Ahmad was an influential and prolific writer and social critic, whose body of work includes short stories, notably the collection An Exchange of Visits; novels including By the Pen, The School Principal, and A Stone on a Grave; travelogues including A Straw in Mecca, A Journey to Russia, and A Journey to America; anthropological studies; essays; reviews; and translations. His best known work is Gharbzadegi (Occidentosis), which has also been translated to English as “Weststruckness” and “Westoxification,” a cultural critique of Westernization in Iran. In 2013, Restless Books published his polemical work based on his journey to Israel as The Israeli Republic. Al-e Ahmad was married to the novelist and translator Simin Daneshvar; the couple had no children. He died in 1969.

Simin Daneshvar (born April 28, 1921, Shiraz, Iran—died March 8, 2012, Tehran, Iran), was an Iranian author who wrote the enduringly popular Savūshūn (1969; published in English as Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran, 1990, and as A Persian Requiem, 1991), the first modern Persian-language novel written by a woman. In 1948, while Daneshvar was studying Persian literature at the University of Tehran (Ph.D., 1949), she published a short-story collection, Atesh-e khamūsh (The Quenched Fire), the first such book by a woman to come out in Iran. She published a second collection, Shahrī chūn behesht (1961; A City as Paradise) before embarking on Savūshūn. Later novels include Jazīreh-ye Sargardānī (1992; The Island of Perplexity) and Sārebān-e sargardān (2002; Wandering Caravan Master). She was also known for her translations into Persian of such writers as Anton Chekhov and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Daneshvar was married (1950–69) to noted writer and intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad and taught art history at the University of Tehran from the late 1950s until her retirement in 1979.

Bernard Avishai lives in Jerusalem and New Hampshire. He is a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth and an adjunct professor of business at Hebrew University. His most recent book is Promiscuous: "Portnoy’s Complaint" and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness. He is also the author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic.