Stuart R. Schram was born in Excelsior, Minnesota, in 1924. After graduating fron the University of Minnesota in physics, he took his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University. From 1954 to 1967, he conducted research at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and from 1968 until 1989, he was Professor of Politics with reference to China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since 1989, he has worked at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, on the edition of Mao Zedong's pre-1949 writings of which this is the sixth volume.His research has dealt with Leninist theories and their application in Asia, Chinese history and politics in the twentieth century, and the influence of the Chinese tradition on the theory and practice of the state in China. His works include Mao Tse-tung (1967), The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (1969), Marxism and Asia (in collaboration with Hélène Carrère d'Encausse) (1969), Ideology and Policy in China since the Third Plenum, 1978-1984 (1984), and The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (1989). He has also edited a volume entitled Foundations and Limits of State Power in China (1987).Mao Tse-tung and The Thought of Mao Tse-tung have been translated into Chinese and published in Beijing. Stuart Schram is a member of the Authors Guild.,
Nancy J. Hodes was born in Philadelphia in 1946, and spent her formative years in Beijing, China, where her father taught physiology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. After graduating from Radcliffe College in Far Eastern Languages, she edited the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, taught Chinese, and worked as a freelance translator. She returned to China in the 1970s to teach English and work on A Chinese-English Dictionary at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (#1). Later she taught Chinese at Tufts University and Harvard Summer School, worked as a translator for M.E. Sharpe's translation journals and the Mao's Writings Project at Brown University, and served a Assistant Editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. After receiving her Ph.D in Chinese literature from Harvard University, she taught East Asian Civilizations and Chinese at Boston College, and worked beginning in 1991 with Stuart R. Schram on the present edition of the Mao Zedong's pre-1949 writings. Until 1995, she served concurrently as Associate Director of the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, founded in 1993 by Soka Gakkai International President Daisaku Ikeda.