Elsa Dorfman (born April 26, 1937) is a portrait photographer who works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is now known for her use of a Polaroid 20 by 24 inch camera (one of only 6 in existence,) from which she creates large prints. She has photographed famous writers, poets, and musicians including Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg.

Her principal published work, originally published in 1974 and out of print but now available on her web site, is Elsa's Housebook - A Woman's Photojournal, a photographic record of family and friends who visited her at 19 Flagg Street in Cambridge when she lived there during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many famous people, especially literary figures associated with the Beat generation, were in her circle of acquaintance and as a result are prominent in the book, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Robert Creeley, in addition to people who would become notable in other fields, such as radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and civil rights lawyer and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education co-founder Harvey A. Silverglate (who would become Dorfman's husband). She has also photographed staples of the Boston rock scene such as Jonathan Richman frontman of The Modern Lovers, and Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith.

Robert Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts and grew up in Acton. He was raised by his mother with one sister, Helen. At the age of four, he lost his left eye. He attended the Holderness School in New Hampshire. He entered Harvard University in 1943, but left to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944-1945. He returned to Harvard in 1946, but eventually took his BA from Black Mountain College in 1955, teaching some courses there as well. When Black Mountain closed in 1957, Creeley moved to San Francisco, where he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He later met and befriended Jackson Pollock in the Cedar Tavern in New York City.

Robert Dorfman (27 October 1916 - 24 June 2002) was emeritus professor of political economy at Harvard University. Dorfman made great contributions to the fields of economics, group testing and in the process of coding theory.

His paper - 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943) is a landmark in the sphere of Combinatorial Group Testing. To quote collaborator and Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow - "After starting his career as a statistician - his paper 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943) is still a landmark - he turned to economics at the moment when linear models of production and allocation captured the profession's imagination." Dorfman co-authored "Linear Programming and Economic Analysis" with Solow and economist Paul A. Samuelson.

Dorfman was born in New York on the 27th of October, 1916. He received his B.A. in Mathematical Statistics from Columbia College, NY in 1936 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1937. He worked for the federal government as a statistician for 4 years, starting in 1939 and also served as an operations analyst for the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War. In 1946, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley and got his Ph.D. in Economics in 1950. Dorfman finally moved to Harvard in 1955. Dorfman's career at Harvard spanned 32 years. Professor of Economics from 1955 to 1972, Dorfman became the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in 1972, a position he held until his retirement in 1987.

Yechiel Michel Dorfman (1913 – 30 July 2006) was the de facto head of the Breslover Hasidim living in post-Stalinist Russia. Due to his persistence and planning, the annual Breslover Rosh Hashana kibbutz (prayer gathering) at the grave of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, which began in 1811, continued on a small scale despite the Communist ban on religious gatherings.

Dorfman was born in Kamenetz-Podolsk in western Ukraine and became a Breslover Hasid in his early teens. He moved to Uman at the age of 15, where he married Rivkah, the granddaughter of Rabbi Abraham Sternhartz, a leading Breslover figure.

During the Stalinist purges of the Ukraine in the late 1930s, Dorfman escaped to Leningrad, where he survived World War II. However, after the war he was arrested by the NKVD and incarcerated in Lubyanka prison in Moscow for two years. Afterwards he was exiled to Siberia for another four and a half years. Upon the death of Stalin in 1953, he was given a reprieve and allowed to settle in Moscow.