One by One, the Stars

From memories of early childhood, parental divorce, and work at Mass General to wise and witty reflections on essays and essayists, Ned Stuckey-French’s compelling posthumous collection encompasses his wide-ranging and richly informed thoughts on some of the most significant cultural and political issues of his time. The striking breadth of his interests—including pieces on such notable public figures as Jon Gnagy, Bobby Kennedy, and Elvis—demonstrates the striking breadth of the essay itself. A masterful performance from start to finish.

* author of The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarian’s Chronicle *

I am grateful to have these last thoughtful ruminations of a significant figure in literary nonfiction, which offer both theory and practice, and which unite the two parts of Stuckey-French’s personality: the sensitive, often conscience-ridden, lonely individual and the serene teacher and sage.

* author of The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present *

Witty, rigorous, pitch-perfect, logical, and wise, these essays are classical in form but never in content. All the various ways we enact our rituals and pro forma social exchanges are under scrutiny as Ned Stuckey-French makes the airtight case we can do better and be better. These essays are quietly and elegantly revolutionary because in them familiar form contains the possibility of reform.

* author of My Unsentimental Education and On the Outskirts of Normal *

Sixty-nine years is a long time, yet Ned Stuckey-French was a young man when he died. His curiosity and optimism (a couple more of his cardinal midwestern virtues) kept him so. You get the feeling reading these essays that the writer had long been building an extraordinary life, with great care and patience, but that much of it was yet to be lived. There would have been more books, more essays, should have been even more than the terrific ones Price and Elizabeth Stuckey-French bring together in this collection. . . . That someone so good at being human should have had so few years to show the rest of us how it’s done seems a cosmic injustice.

* Fourth Gen