Jon Carroll is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning in 1982, at that time succeeding Charles McCabe's column. He is featured on the back page of the Datebook (the newspaper's entertainment section) on weekdays. Locally, he is best known for his moderate-to-liberal politics and his cat columns.

Carroll was born in Los Angeles and raised in nearby Pasadena. He attended (but did not finish) UC Berkeley, where he edited the campus humor magazine, the California Pelican. Before becoming a newspaper columnist, he worked in the editorial vineyards at Rolling Stone magazine (assistant editor, 1970) where he wrote "Voice Denies Nixon Drug Use," Oui, a Playboy spinoff (editor, 1972); the Village Voice (West Coast editor, 1974); WomenSports magazine (Consulting editor); and New West magazine (editor, 1978, where he won a National Magazine Award in 1979).

Carroll has long lived in Oakland, with his wife, author Tracy Johnston, and two cats named Archie and Bucket, occasional subjects of his columns (the cats, that is, not his wife). Archie died on July 20, 2007.

William T. "Bill" Danoff (born May 7, 1946, Springfield, Massachusetts) is an American songwriter and singer. His best known song as a performer is "Afternoon Delight", which Danoff performed as a member of the Starland Vocal Band. As a songwriter, he also wrote or co-wrote hits for John Denver, Emmylou Harris and Doug and the Slugs.

Danoff and his then-wife, Taffy Nivert, wrote "I Guess He'd Rather Be in Colorado" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads," both of which were hits for John Denver. The latter song is the de facto state song of West Virginia, although it has no official status as such (and was written in a house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.).^{[citation needed]} Danoff has stated he had never been in West Virginia before writing the song.^{[citation needed]} He had even briefly considered using "Massachusetts" rather than "West Virginia", as both four-syllable state names would have fit the song's meter. Denver recorded about a dozen Danoff compositions from 1972 through the end of his career.

Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American author primarily known for novels, which can be characterized as magic realist, slipstream or modern fantasy. He also writes short stories.

Carroll was born in New York City to Sidney Carroll, a film writer whose credits included The Hustler, and June Carroll (née Sillman), an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway shows and two films. He is the half brother of composer Steve Reich and nephew of Broadway producer Leonard Sillman. His parents were Jewish, but Carroll was raised in the Christian Science religion. A self-described "troubled teenager," he finished primary education at the Loomis School in Connecticut and graduated with honors from Rutgers University in 1971, marrying artist Beverly Schreiner in the same year. He relocated to Vienna, Austria a few years later and began teaching literature at the American International School, and has made his home in Austria ever since.

His first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), is indicative of his general style and subject matter. Told through realistic first person narration, the novel concerns a young schoolteacher searching for meaning through researching the life of a favorite children's book author of his youth, which involves meeting the author's daughter. Everything seems fine until the dog begins talking to him, as the line between the fantasy world created by his research subject and the reality of the schoolteacher's life, while the reader begins to wonder just how much trust can be placed in this narrator. Subsequent novels would expand on these themes, but often contain unreliable narrators in a world where magic is viewed as natural. (One commentator claimed in The Times that "if he were a Latin American writer with a three-part name, his books would be described as magical-realist".)

Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. (December 31, 1943 – October 12, 1997), known professionally as John Denver, was an American singer/songwriter, activist, and humanitarian. After traveling and living in numerous locations while growing up in his military family, Denver began his music career in folk music groups in the late 1960s. His greatest commercial success was as a solo singer. Throughout his life Denver recorded and released approximately 300 songs, about 200 of which he composed. He performed primarily with an acoustic guitar and sang about his joy in nature, his enthusiasm for music, and relationship trials. Denver's music appeared on a variety of charts including country & western, the Billboard Hot 100, and adult contemporary, in all earning him 12 gold and 4 platinum albums with his signature songs "Sunshine on My Shoulders", "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "Leaving on a Jet Plane", "Rocky Mountain High", "Annie's Song", and "Calypso".

Denver further starred in films and several notable television specials in the 1970s and 1980s. In the following decades he continued to record, but also focused on calling attention to environmental issues, lent his vocal support to space exploration, and testified in front of Congress to protest censorship in music. He is known for his love of the state of Colorado, which he sang about numerous times. He lived in Aspen, Colorado, for much of his life, and influenced the governor to name him Poet Laureate of the state in 1974. The Colorado state legislature also adopted "Rocky Mountain High" as one of its state songs in 2007. He was an avid pilot, and died while flying his personal aircraft at the age of 53. Denver was one of the most popular acoustic artists of the 1970s.