Lawrence LeShan (1920-2020) was born in New York City on September 8, 1920, to Julius and Rose LeShan. He married Eda Joan Grossman in 1944, beginning an intellectual partnership that ended with her death in March 2002. The couple had one daughter and a granddaughter. Lawrence LeShan married Ada Nicolescu on July 20, 2007.

Lawrence LeShan was educated at the College of William and Mary (B.A., 1942), the University of Nebraska (M.S., 1943), and the University of Chicago where he earned a Ph.D. in human development (1954). Following several years of U.S. military service, he became head of the department for psychology at the Institute of Applied Biography in New York (1954-1964) and was a research associate of the Ayer Foundation in New York (1954-1970). His mainstream research focused on cancer and therapy, war, the state of psychology, psychotherapy, and transpersonal experiences.

LeShan moved into the field of parapsychology "through," as he put it, "a fundamental mistake." After depleting a grant he had been using to fund some of his research, he was curious to explore a discipline in which he had previously not found any value. A colleague referred him to Eileen J. Garrett, a medium and founder of the Parapsychology Foundation. "It was a meeting made in heaven," LeShan told the Parapsychology Foundation in 2017. "We needed each other. She wanted to be monitored by a real psychologist and I wanted someone like her to study." In the course of his career, LeShan authored or co-authored some two dozen books and more than 75 articles.

Lawrence LeShan died on November 9, 2020, in New York City at the age of 100.

Eda Joan Grossman LeShan (1922-2002) was born in Manhattan on June 6, 1922. Her mother, Jean Schick Grossman, was a parent educator, and her father, Max Grossman, was a lawyer and president of the Ethical Culture Society of New York. She graduated from the Fieldston School and received a degree in early childhood education from Teachers College at Columbia University. She earned a master's degree in child psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Eda Grossman married Lawrence LeShan in 1944.

LeShan wrote her first book when she was 43, began to appear regularly on a television show when she was 46 and got her own program on educational television when she was 48. She brought psychoanalytic insights and common sense to two dozen books meant to guide people through life's challenges.

In addition to her books, which have been translated into nine languages, and her television and radio shows, she wrote a regular column for Newsday for years and was a contributing editor of Parents magazine. Her articles appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine in the 1960's. For nine years, she wrote the "Talking It Over" column for Woman's Day.

As she aged, Eda LeShan wrote more about older people. In her 70s, she wrote a play, "The Lobster Reef," in reference to the vulnerability lobsters experience when they shed their shells and are completely naked until they grow a new one. It told the story of a woman battling to rid herself of literal and figurative cancers. The one-woman play opened off-Broadway in New York in 1995 on her 73rd birthday.

Eda LeShan died on March 2, 2002, at the age of 79, at her home in Riverdale, the Bronx.

Ada Nicolescu (1929- ) was born in Bucharest, Romania, on January 9, 1929, where she witnessed life through the 1930s, World War II, and Stalin’s Communism.

She graduated from Bucharest’s Carol Davila University of Medicine. In 1961, she emigrated to Paris and later to the United States where she took up residence in New York City. In addition to her medical degree, Dr. Nicolescu earned a Master of Arts in art history from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

She is a member of the Medical Society of the State of New York and the American Psychiatric Association and, at age 93, continues to work as a psychiatrist in private practice in Manhattan.

Nicolescu is the author of three novels, Prelude in Black and Green: A Novel (2009), The Black and the Green: The Sequel (2013), and Four Hundred Bones: Stalin's Teeth in Academia (2015).