Samuel Roth was an American publisher and writer. He was the plaintiff in the landmark 1957 case Roth v. United States, in which the United States Supreme Court redefined the constitutional test for determining which constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment. It became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions in the 1960s.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.