Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908. As a child he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen and returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago, where in 1935 he began to work on the Federal Writers' Project.

He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the following year. His other titles include his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war Richard Wright went to live in Paris with his wife and daughters, remaining there until his death in 1960.

David Smith is editing Marx's notes on globalization and non-Western cultures for Yale University Press. The author of Marx's Capital Illustrated (Haymarket, 2014, illustrated by Phil Evans), Smith is a professor and department chair at the University of Kansas.

Jonathan Green has been an editor, writer, commentator and broadcaster in a 30-year career as a journalist. He has been a working journalist since the late 1970s. The bulk of Jonathan's career has been spent in newspapers, beginning with a cadetship at The Canberra Times and taking in a small Cook’s tour of Australian dailies: the Melbourne Herald, The Herald Sun, the Sunday Herald, The Sunday Age and 15 years at The Age.

Jonathan left The Age in 2006 to work for the first time online as editor of Crikey. After three years there and having gained a nodding familiarity with the ways of the internet, he at last found his way to the ABC as founding editor of ABC Online's The Drum. He presents Blueprint for Living on ABC Radio National and fills in on RN Drive.