The 1,001 Nights

Sir Richard Francis Burton was a British explorer, scholar and soldier. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was awarded a knighthood in 1886. His works and letters extensively criticized colonial policies of the British Empire, even to the detriment of his career.

Edward William Lane as a British orientalist, translator and lexicographer. He is known for his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and the Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as his translations of One Thousand and One Nights and Selections from the Kur-an. Lane's version of One Thousand and One Nights first saw light as a monthly serial from 1838 to 1840, and was published in three volumes in 1840. A revised edition was released in 1859.

Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. His Blue Fairy Book (1889) was a beautifully produced and illustrated edition of fairy tales that has become a classic.

Jonathan Scott was an English orientalist, best known for his translation of the Arabian Nights. In 1805 the honorary degree of D.C.L. was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford in recognition of his attainments in oriental literature. His edition of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, revised from Antoine Galland's French version, was the earliest effort to render the Arabian Nights into literary English.

Nora Archibald Smith (1859-1934) was an American children's author of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and sister of Kate Douglas Wiggin. Nora and Kate co-authored and co-edited a series of children's books, including The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales (1909).

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico City and is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic's Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile's Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans's work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."

Kate Douglas Wiggin was an American educator, author and composer. She wrote children's stories, most notably the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and composed collections of children's songs. Besides the talent for story-telling, she was a musician, sang well, and composed settings for her poems.

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran. In 1981, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987. Dr. Nafisi returned to the United States in 1997 - earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth, and especially young women.

Laurence Housman was an English playwright, writer and illustrator during the Victorian era. Housman was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, one of seven children including an older brother and sister, the classical scholar and poet A. E. Housman and the writer Clemence Housman. Housman turned more and more to writing after his eyesight began to fail. He was also an advocate of the Suffrage movement in England.

John Payne was an English poet and translator. Initially he pursued a legal career and had associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later he became involved with limited edition publishing and the Villon Society. He is now best known for his translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, The Arabian Nights and the Diwan Hafez.

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story.