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Eleanor Allen is a granddaughter of George A. Waggoner, who has been discussed in this book in the chapter "Five Personal Essayists". Born in Oregon, she lived in Washington, D.C., from the age of four till the age of fifteen, attending private schools there. After her return to Oregon she spent a year, from 1919 to 1920, at Oregon State College. She is familiar to radio audiences, since many of her lyrics have been set to music by well-known composers and presented from various broadcasting stations. Several of her plays have also been given over the radio. For a while she was music critic for Music and Musicians, a Seattle magazine. She is the author of several juvenile serials and has contributed more than 500 poems to American magazines. Seeds of Earth, a book of poems, was published in 1933.

Born in Missouri, Verne Bright lost both his parents when he was a small boy, and as an orphaned youth knocked about the country earning a precarious living. He came to Oregon at the age of 18 and was taken into the home of Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Barker, with whom he has since lived, much of the time in Washington County near Beaverton. He was graduated from the Brownsville High School, and from Pacific University in 1925. He spent two years in the Philippines and with the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia. For two years he worked in a newspaper office and for one year taught English in Pacific University. His first poem, a narrative of Oregon Indian mythology, was written while he was still in high school and was published in the Oregon Teachers' Monthly. Since