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Mouni Sadhu, born in Poland as Mieczyslaw Demetriusz Sudowski. Although he published a number of books, the details of his life are sketchy. He was known variously as an occultist and a practicing Catholic to his death and a bridge-builder between Christian and Hindu traditions. As a young man, he fought for Germany during World War I. He married in 1936, but his wife was said to have died in a German bombing of Poland in 1939. He fought against the Germans in World War II, was captured and imprisoned until liberated by the Allies in 1945. He then went first to France and after another year to Brazil. There, he wrote his first book (in Portuguese), «Quem Sou Eu?». Thence, he spent a year studying under Sri Ramana Maharshi before permanently residing in Australia. He writes to Merton from Box Hill, Victoria, Australia, asking Merton to write a Foreword for a planned book, «Contemplation: an Outline for Practical Study» (published under the title «Meditation: an Outline for Practical Study«). (Source: Pugsley, Tim. "Mouni Sadhu - Information." Website. Accessed 2006/03/15. ‹http://www.mounisadhu.com›.)

The Rev. Dr. Howard Schomer was a Congregationalist minister and President of Chicago Theological Seminary. He was a Delegated Observer of the Second Vatican Council, representing the International Congregational Council. He was an anti-war activist and took part in some of the Civil Rights Movement's demonstrations with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Rev. John Whitman Sears was a psychologist and Universalist minister. He was born in Lawrence, Kansas, but moved with his family to California. He returned to the University of Kansas for college and was afterward ordained a minister. His ministry led him to North Carolina and back to Kansas where he left the ministry for social work. During the Great Depression, he moved with his family to San Carlos, California, studying psychology. He later moved to San Mateo where he joined his brother in a business of counseling and psychology, and from there he writes to Merton. (Source: "In Memoriam: Unitarian Universalist Ministers 2000-2001." Website of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Accessed 21 April 2006. ‹http://www.uua.org/programs/ministry/news/obituaries2001.html›.)

Robert D. Sharp served in a number of missions in the military in the Second World War. He sends his mission card to Merton, detailing 35 missions from 1944-1945. He read Merton's letter in the April 2, 1965 issue of «Commonweal» and said that he "wept over the part I played in that war."

Paul K. T. Sih was an author of histories of China and translator of Chinese classics. Sih was born near Shanghai, China. Nominally a Buddhist from a family that did not stress religion, he was exposed to Christianity through earning a doctorate in Rome, Italy, and though a Chinese government position in Rome. Through this job, he met Merton's friend John C. H. Wu, who was Chinese ambassador to the Vatican. Wu, having bridged connections between Christianity and Taoism, was a factor in Sih's conversion to Catholicism. In 1959, Sih became a professor of history and Director of the Center for Asian Studies at St. John's University in New York. It was here he began his correspondence with Merton. (Source: «The Hidden Ground of Love», pp. 548-549.)

John H. Slate was a classmate of Merton's at Columbia University. He was a lawyer with the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom in New York, and specialized in aviation law. In addition, he contributed humorous pieces to «Fortune», «The Atlantic Monthly», and «The Saturday Evening Post». Merton had heard reports about Slate from other Columbia alumni friends, but had not been in direct contact for many years. Slate died of a heart attack later in that same year they were in contact concerning the literary estate.

Sociologist and economist Dallas Walker Smythe was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and moved to the United States in 1918. He was a life-long pacifist. In the late 1930's, he became a civil servant in Washington, D.C. In 1948, he joined the new Institute of Communications Research at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is from here, he writes to Merton and Merton responds. (Source: Gourlie, Michael; Caitlin Webster; Frances Fournier; and Enid Britt. "Dallas Smythe fonds". Jan. 1998. Website of Simon Fraser University Archives. Accessed, 9 May 2006: Bellarmine University Library. ‹http://www.sfu.ca/archives/F-16/F-16fonds.html›.)

Ambassador Soedjatmoko writes from the Embassy of Indonesia in Washington, D.C. Raden Soedjatmoko Saleh Mangoediningrat went also by the nickname "Mas Koko" or simply "Koko". By the end of their five hour meeting in Washington, D.C., the two men referred to each other as Tom and Koko.

Douglas Steere was a prominent Quaker author and philosopher, serving a long tenure as professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He demonstrated leadership through organizing relief efforts in northern Europe through the American Friends Service Committee after World War II and in representing the Society of Friends at the Second Vatican Council in 1964. He first met Merton in 1962 at Gethsemani, traveling with John Heidbrink of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. (Source: Elliott, J. Michael. "Douglas Steere, 93, Author, Professor And Quaker Leader." «New York Times» obituary. 16 February 1995. Online. Bellarmine University Library, Louisville, KY. 2009/07/07. ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/16/obituaries/douglas-steere-93-author-professor-and-quaker-leader.html›.)

Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-born scientist who, along with Enrico Fermi in 1955, was awarded a patent for a nuclear fission reactor. In 1942, along with Fermi, he conducted the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. He coordinated the letter from Einstein which was sent to President Roosevelt that led to the commencement of the Manhattan Project. After the Second World War, he became involved in the movement to limit nuclear arms, give control to the civilian populace, and to prevent nuclear war. He also shifted from nuclear physics and engineering to molecular biology. (Source: "Hall of Fame: Inventor's Profile - Leo Szilard." Website of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. 2002. Accessed 20 June 2006. Bellarmine University Library. ‹http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/141.html›.)

Diana Eck was a student of Amiya Chakravarty at Smith College and writes to express her praise for Merton's book «Gandhi on Non-Violence». Dr. Eck has gone on to earn degrees from the University of London and Harvard and to write books about the religious traditions of India, religious pluralism and Christianity's encounter with other religions.

Eileen Egan was a primary figure in the Catholic peace movement. She was a cofounder of the organization American PAX, which became Pax Christi-USA, a branch of the international movement. She worked with and wrote books about Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. With Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn, Jim Douglass and Richard Carbrey, she advocated for the strong language against war and in support of conscientious objection in teaching of the Second Vatican Council.

"Father English was a native New Yorker who spent his younger years as a supporter and collaborator in the Catholic Worker Movement in New York with Dorothy Day. [In 1952,] he came to Georgia to serve the Lord and the Church as a Trappist monk in Conyers." (Source: Sanches, Joseph. "The Death Of A Monk" 21 Dec 1972. «The Georgia Bulletin Online Edition: The Newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta». Accessed 3 Dec 2004. ‹http://www.georgiabulletin.org/local/1972/12/21/c/›.)

Ted Enslin writes from the isolated area of Temple, Maine. He is a poet and hermit who has published a number of books of poems and whose work has appeared in literary magazines. Despite this, his lifestyle has allowed him to remain out of the spotlight. Merton published a poem of his in the third volume of «Monks Pond».

Br. George Every, a lay brother of the Society of the Sacred Mission, writes first while visiting Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, and later from the Anglican College at Kelham, England, where he taught. He covered monastic topics for Dorothy Emmet's journal «Theoria to Theory», to which Merton was a contributor.

Richard Felciano was Ford Foundation composer-in-residence for the Detroit Public Schools at the time of correspondence. He wanted to use Merton's poem, "The Captives - A Psalm" for a setting for chorus and orchestra. He later became professor of music at the University of California at Berkeley.

Fr. Anastasius Fettig was Prior at Gethsemani at the time of this correspondence. He was reacting to the negative response among some about Merton's pamphlet he distributed before the 1968 abbatial election, "My Campaign Platform for Non-Abbot and Permanent Keeper of Present Doghouse".

Archbishop George Bernard Flahiff, elevated to Cardinal in 1969, was bishop of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. At the Second Vatican Council, he was involved in what was known as Schema 13, which became «Gaudium et Spes», the Pontifical Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Merton was particularly interested in the sections on peace, war, and how it would address nuclear weapons.

Dom James Fox came to Gethsemani in 1927. He was serving as guestmaster when Merton's younger brother, John Paul, visited the monastery, and Fox made arrangements for John Paul's baptism. In 1948, Fox was elected abbot after the death of Dom Frederic Dunne. Fox had a keen business sense, a graduate of Harvard Business School prior to entering Gethsemani, and helped Gethsemani support itself financially through mechanization of the farm and through establishment of a mail order cheese and bourbon fruit cake business. Merton was not a fan of this mechanization, the cheese business, and had other philosophical differences with Fox. Although much has been written about their rocky relationship at times, Fox went out of his way to ensure that Merton had greater solitude in his later years, a decision which likely kept Merton at Gethsemani. He had enough faith in Merton to appoint him as his novice master and as Fox's personal confessor. Fox would eventually step down as abbot in 1967 to pursue to live as a hermit as Merton had done. (Source: The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, edited by William Shannon, Christine Bochen, and Patrick O'Connell, pp.160-161.)

Fr. Matthew Fox (Br. Matthew in his letter to Merton) was a Dominican priest who stirred up quite a following and much controversy over his ideas about creation spirituality, denial of original sin, interfaith unity and ecological Christianity. The Vatican had him silenced and he was dismissed from the Dominicans. In 1994, he was accepted by an Episcopal bishop in California. At the time of writing to Merton, he was still in his graduate studies with the Dominicans.

Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany. He left Nazi Germany in 1934 and came to New York. After teaching at a number of universities, he became professor of psychoanalysis at the National University of Mexico in 1951. Fromm was an author, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and anthropologist. Religiously, he had a Jewish upbringing and a background in the Talmud. In his adult life, he was atheist, but stressed a non-theistic spirituality that he found in the writings of Karl Marx, who was a profound influence on his view of human adjustment to society and which shaped his writings on psychoanalysis. (Source: «The Hidden Ground of Love», p. 308.)