Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (1874-1950) was a Japanese-American writer and educator. She began writing essays on Japan for local Cincinnati newspapers to practice her English, then for the magazine Asia, which were later published in book form as A Daughter of the Samurai. This book became an international bestseller. Sugimoto went on to publish several other novels and eventually moved to New York where she taught Japanese language and history at Columbia University.

Janice P. Nimura is the author of Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, a New York Times Notable book in 2015. More recently, she received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was a journalist, author, lecturer and theatrical producer best known for the novels Parnassus on Wheels, The Haunted Bookshop and Kitty Foyle.