I am grateful to have the opportunity to thank Marshall Brown publicly for his unmatched intellectual generosity and editorial prowess since I have relied on it so thoroughly for decades.I first met Marshall as a job candidate and junior colleague, whereupon he told me—in response to the very first piece of writing I shared with him—“It occurs to me that you may not know the meaning of a paragraph.” If my teeth veritably chattered, I did not keep aloof long. For one thing, among his many gifts, Marshall is a very fine cello player, who will play for you upon request, and I am very fond of the cello.More pertinently, I learned, as many reading this will know from their own experience, that though Marshall is candid and forthright, he is also yielding, persuadable, and unstinting with his time, erudition, and editorial elegance. His exactingness as editor is also an open door. Over the years I have sent him all sorts of things, which he always found time for, some of which he published and some of which he declined. “This is strong,” he once said, but “not your best work”—which was true. He has taught me to strive for lucidity and succinctness, to avoid italics for emphasis, and to fend off scare quotes as if they were plagues on written language. Deploy is a very tired word, Marshall once (rightly) told me, though he excused one particular usage in reference to Lord Palmerston’s gunboats. He has said many other things so perceptive and encouraging that I could not possibly repeat them in print. But I will say that his affirmative words have meant more to me than anyone’s, not least because I know that they are genuine; that if I were not doing my best work, this one reader, if not any other, would be certain to say so.Eleni Coundouriotis, who introduced the panel at the Seattle MLA, when these thoughts were first formulated, offered a few words at that time about our mutual experience of working with Marshall on the special issue “What Is and Isn’t Changing: Critique after Postcritique.” Like all of my work, inside and outside the pages of MLQ, the introduction Eleni and I cowrote for that issue, and the essays we contributed to it, became stronger for his painstaking advice. But that is something that we knew we could count on. What we hadn’t realized we’d discover, as we attempted to achieve some grasp of the core issues and debates that the twenty-first century has brought to the fore, was how MLQ’s articles, and especially its special issues, had consistently provided unparalleled provocations, catalysts, and crystallizations.In addition to his unfailing care and attention, Marshall, in his editorial role, has the even rarer gift of never aging intellectually: in the matter of literary criticism and the world of ideas, he is the least conservative—the most supple, youthful, and passionate—person I know. There is simply nothing else like Marshall and the critical and literary enterprise he has nurtured in MLQ over these three decades. Since it is his special genius to teach every author he works with how to write and think better, one takes comfort in knowing that, even when he steps down as editor, there will be dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of scholars and critics inspired by his example and keen to live up to his standards.