Roger Pearson is Fellow and Praelector in French at The Queen's College, Oxford, and the author of Stendhal's Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (Clarendon Press, 1988), and The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's 'contes philosophiques' (Clarendon Press, 1990). He has translated and edited Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories (1988), and Zola, La Bête humaine (1996), and revised and edited Thomas Walton's translation of Zola's The Masterpiece (1993), all for World's Classics.
Margaret Mauldon holds a doctorate in French from the University of Massachusetts. She has taught French at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. She has been working as a freelance translator since 1987, and her translation of Zola's L'Assommoir is published in World's Classics.