Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the twentieth century's most important novelists, as well as a brilliant short story writer and foreign correspondent. His body of work includes the novels A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Sun Also Rises. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Charlton Heston, best known for such epic films as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, has appeared in more than forty motion pictures, among them The Agony and the Ecstasy, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, and True Lies. He has received a number of awards both in the United States and abroad, including a Best Actor Academy Award^® for Ben-Hur. Away from the camera, he has been active in the Screen Actors Guild, the American Film Institute, and the Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles.