The Puritan Gift was written by two brothers, Kenneth Hopper, who is an engineer, and William Hopper, who is an investment banker. William was born in Glasgow, Scotland attending a grammar school in the same city and Glasgow University, where he took a First Class Honours degree in Modern Languages. After working on Wall Street, he became a Director of Morgan Grenfell, the London merchant bank. He represented Manchester as a Conservative in the European Parliament from 1979 until 1984. He is now chairman of WJ Hopper & Co. Limited, a boutique investment bank that directs capital to the developing world and elsewhere. The two things he is most proud of in his life are (a) being Founding Chairman of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London (he still serves on its investment committee); and (b) helping to write The Puritan Gift. Kenneth and William are respectively 82 and 78 years old; neither has written a book before.