James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. He was none the less educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, and displayed considerable academic and literary ability.

Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin, the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all his fiction.

He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). James Joyce died in Zurich, on 13 January 1941.

A member of the generation of British poets who achieved fame during World War I, Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) burst on the literary scene when two of his war sonnets ("The Dead" and "The Soldier") were published in London's Times Literary Supplement on March 11, 1915. Less than two months later his 1914 and Other Poems was published and went through 24 impressions by June, 1918. After being inducted into the British Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Brooke sailed on a Navy ship in February, 1915, heading toward the fighting at Gallipoli in Turkey. He died shortly thereafter, at age 27, on a French hospital ship moored off Skyros in the Aegean Sea from sepsis derived from an infected mosquito bite. Brooke was buried in an olive grove on Skyros.