Anaïs Nin was born on February 21, 1903 in Paris, France. As a young child, she frequently traveled with her family around Europe. In 1914, her mother moved the family to New York after her father abandoned them, an event which inspired Nin to start writing her famous diaries. In 1923, she married the banker (and later filmmaker) Hugh P. Guiler in Cuba, and the couple moved to Paris in 1931. Nin's return to Paris marked a creative shift in her life as she became acquainted with writers such as Antonin Artaud, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller and his wife, June, and started psychotherapy. Her first published novel, The House of Incest (1936), was well-received, and she continued to write fiction and diary entries. At the beginning of World War II, Nin moved back to the United States, where she struggled to find an American publisher for her work and self-published under the imprint Gemor Press. Critic Edmund Wilson's positive review of Under a Glass Bell Jar (1944) helped her to finally secure a publisher. The next twenty years of her life were spent writing and acting. In 1961, Nin moved to Los Angeles, and five years later, the first of her diaries was published. Anaïs Nin passed away on January 14, 1977, in Los Angeles, CA.

The poet John Roger Bloom, born in 1912 in Pennsylvania, frequently found himself on the wrong side of the law, and after robbing a bank with a toy pistol, he received a life sentence, which he was serving in the Missouri Penitentiary when he wrote to Henry Miller in September 1956 for assistance. Miller put Bloom in touch with his friend Nin, and she became interested in helping Bloom obtain parole and encouraged his contacts and relationships with the outside world. Nin and Miller ultimately succeeded in their endeavor to help Bloom to be released on parole after 29 years of imprisonment. Bloom married Gertrude Schreiber, and they moved to the Chicago area where Bloom worked in a barber shop. He died in Cook County in 1979.