The first time I met Ned Stuckey-French was spring semester, 2011. I was a master's student at Florida State University wanting to add his class, “The American Essay and Magazine Culture.” I hadn't been able to register online because the class was full, so I'd shown up the first day, hoping to rely on the instructor's kindness. Problem was, five or six others had the same idea, swelling the number of students to well over twenty. After Ned called the role and realized the situation, he grinned and said, “All right. You're all in.”I grew familiar with that grin as the weeks went on. Tall with a runner's build, Ned was easygoing and affable yet full of seriously good information as we dug into selected personal essays, readings on the craft of nonfiction, and assignments that had us researching the original publishing contexts of various essays. He'd modeled this curriculum on his book The American Essay in the American Century (University of Missouri Press, 2012), which came out that May. That book, along with his co-writing credit on the eighth edition of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Pearson, 2010) and his co-editing of Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to our Time (University of Iowa Press, 2010) with Carl Klaus, solidified his case for tenure, a process that at the time I knew little about. All I knew was that Ned had taken an interest in me and my nonfiction writing, had suggested we play golf, had offered to read my work outside of class. He even proposed I write a book review for Fourth Genre, this section that he helmed from 2008 until just before he died of cancer in June 2019.During the eight years I knew him, Ned became more than a professor. He was my golf buddy, my loyal friend, but most importantly, he was my mentor: my guide into the channels of publishing and academia, my role model for the kinds of conversations and interactions I might have in this field. That's why when I saw the announcement, more than a year after his death, of a posthumous collection of his essays, I rejoiced. I was happy for the world to get to read Ned's creative (“as opposed to destructive?” I can hear him saying) nonfiction. And I was happy for Ned.One by One, the Stars, according to editor John T. Price's foreword, builds upon “a collection of essays [Ned] had been working on” that “remained unfinished at the time of his death.” In three parts, the book includes more than a dozen previously published essays and discussions of the form, along with a few unpublished pieces. The nine essays of Part 1 trace Ned's coming of age, from inquisitive child feeling out his parents’ dysfunctional marriage, to adolescent caretaker for his younger siblings, to politically minded teen staking his claim with Bobby Kennedy. The essays of Ned's youth unfold with remarkable thought, feeling, and technique. “South Side,” for instance, revisits an evening in Chicago, during the early 1960s, when the French family automobile needs late-night service from a Black-owned garage. “My dad is fidgeting with the change in his pocket and still nodding too agreeably,” Ned recalls, as his father lingers by the car, while in the waiting room, between his mom and the Black attendant, “Things are a little too friendly.” The present-tense narration, along with Ned's keen awareness, allows these explorations of racial and marital tensions to hum like the motor under the hood. “Backyards,” too, explores the dynamics of adult interactions when the neighbor, Earl Butz, comes to ask, “‘Whatcha doing up there, Charley?’” Ned's dad, Charley, is building a treehouse in the French backyard that's decidedly less well-kempt than the Butzes’. The two fathers are agriculture professors who later do stints in Washington, DC—Earl Butz for Nixon and Ford, Charley French for Carter. “I was only twelve and I didn't know all that these backyards can symbolize,” Ned writes, “but I registered the differences.” Likewise, national politics come to bear in “Meeting Bobby Kennedy,” but Ned keeps the focus local, on Indiana spring, 1968, his senior year of high school, and the living rooms he visits while canvassing for Kennedy. The moment Ned manages to shake hands with Bobby on the tarmac of the local airport before a campaign rally resonates with immediacy and detail. It's one of those moments, as Ned demonstrates, a person never forgets.After the first seven essays, Part 1 travels to Boston, with “Mass General,” the hospital where Ned worked as a janitor for ten years after graduating from Harvard, moonlighting as a union organizer. An earlier version of this essay appeared online as “A Real-World Education: Revisiting Studs Terkel's Working,” though this version is much more extensive. I'd heard Ned tease the idea of writing a book-length memoir about this time, and I always wished he would. Maybe he was getting around to it, but what we have here is a measured and detailed account that interrogates Ned's motivations to forfeit the privilege of his Ivy League degree while finding himself more privileged all the same, by virtue of his being a tall, straight white guy, than his fellow janitors. The labor drives fail in the end, due in part to the hospital's union-busting consultants, though Ned doesn't give up on the socialist ideal. “I still believe in socialism,” Ned declares, “because for me the socialist vision is one of peace, opportunity, and equality. To me, it is still the only vision that is hopeful and makes sense.”On the heels of Ned's ruminations over race and class and where he and his family fit in the social equation, Part 1 ends with a grace note. “It is the end of May, and Elizabeth and I are taking a walk,” begins the brief, lyrical essay “Walking the Tracks.” After all his youthful striving and labor organizing, Ned has taken a job as an English teacher in Indiana, where he's met Elizabeth Stuckey, his future wife and the mother of his two daughters, the person whose last name he'd affix to his own. The couple finds groundhog bones and identifies wildflowers, with Ned's mind ranging over his class and his students, before climbing atop “an abandoned silo that stands by itself like a bunker.” From there, the land unfurls, the farmhouses and hunting camps, Venus overhead, “and then, one by one, the stars.” It's an arresting image, title-worthy, the whole pastoral essay indicative of Ned's impressive range.The last time Ned and I met up in person was at the AWP conference, 2017, in Washington, DC. We'd made a plan to catch up over beers, and on a Friday afternoon after panels and the book fair, I held down a high top in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel while Ned got the first round. Conference-goers chattered and their glassware clinked all around us while others streamed past, in and out of the February chill. I was an MFA student then, in my third year at Emerson College in Boston. Ned had written me a stellar letter of recommendation for nonfiction programs, and several schools had tried to recruit me. One Midwestern professor, when I'd flown up for the campus tour, had shaken my hand and told me, with an earnest smile, “I'll be your Ned Stuckey-French of the Midwest.” Ned let out a big belly laugh that day in the lobby when I told him that story. All the same, he thought I'd made the right decision to accept the offer in Boston, his old stomping grounds.We finished our round and Ned went back to get us another, and although I offered, he got the third round, too. Meanwhile, people he knew kept yelling out his name, rushing over to shake his hand. Former students, colleagues, folks he knew through writing and editing. He introduced me to all of them. We had a blast that afternoon, and we managed to talk a bit about our work, too. I'd written my second book review for Fourth Genre by then, and I'd taken the helm as editor-in-chief of Redivider, Emerson's graduate-student-run literary magazine. All the while, I was working on a Bob Dylan-themed manuscript for my MFA thesis, and Ned asked what I knew about Dylan's walking off the set of the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963, which wasn't much. Ned had been looking into the incident, when Dylan left after Sullivan's staff told him not to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” as part of a study in middlebrow culture. Middlebrow was Ned's next project, his extension of The American Essay in the American Century, which tracks the essay genre from the late nineteenth century through just after World War II.Part 2 of One by One, the Stars hints toward what that middlebrow book might've looked like. In terms of the essay genre, middlebrow, as I understand it—though Ned would've challenged me here—has to do with meeting readers where they are, not offending their sensibilities with lowbrow antics or forcing them to contort their minds into highbrow figurations. Within that realm of accessibility lies Elvis, for whom Ned delivers a good-natured defense in “An Argument for Elvis.” Ned thinks hard about anti-Elvis skepticism among white intellectuals, which, he admits, “in some corners of myself I share.” But then, he writes, “I've looked hard at my residual anti-Elvisism and decided it's rooted finally in class bias.” The rest of the essay finds Ned deconstructing a list of reasons to disdain Elvis—he's dumb, he's racist, he's not Dylan, and so on—in a fun and funny romp that finally finds The King “anything but banal.” The ensuing essay, “Thank You, Jon Gnagy,” occasioned by Ned bonding with his daughter over YouTube videos of the painting teacher's old television shows, addresses middlebrow culture directly: “I am middle-class and middlebrow, a product of mid-twentieth-century American middlebrow culture.” Ned proclaims, “My family's journey parallels that of the country's new middle class.” The final essay of Part 2, meanwhile, “The Book of Knowledge: Essays and Encyclopedias,” attempts to define middlebrow by what it's not: an encyclopedia entry. As a college student home for summer, Ned writes his dad's annual World Book Yearbook entry on agriculture. Interestingly, none of that entry makes it into the essay, but instead a discussion of Roland Barthes and the essay genre presages the craft discussions to come in Part 3 as Ned asserts, “But here's the rub, essayists: Isn't the essay . . . well, isn't it middlebrow?”“Considering that this might be the last opportunity to publish Ned's essays under one cover,” John T. Price writes in the foreword to One by One, the Stars, he and Elizabeth laudably decided to add Part 3, consisting of four craft essays not included in Ned's original manuscript. The first of these, “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing: Toward a Definition of the Essay,” has become a staple of many nonfiction classes, including the ones I'm now teaching, post-MFA, at various colleges in Boston. Ned frames the personal essay as “split at the root” between Montaignean meandering and Baconian empiricism, though my students, as time goes on, tend more and more to point out the patriarchal Eurocentrism of such a claim. Even Ned, in an e-mail interview he and I did in April 2017, admits “the comparison is reductive, but I do think those threads have always twined their way through the essay tradition.” We'd tapped Ned to be the judge that year for the Redivider nonfiction contest, and we did the interview as a means of promotion. Reading it now makes me cringe, the way I mischaracterized the thrust of Theodor W. Adorno's “Essay as Form,” though Ned set me straight: the way I extended Ned's work as a “communist trade-union organizer” to make the claim that the essay genre itself is “essentially communist,” yet Ned was having none of that. The way I asked him outright what he might be looking for in a winning essay, which led him to quote “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing,” in that “the word essay has collected its own passel of adjectives: personal, formal, informal, humorous, descriptive, expository, reflective, nature, critical, lyric, narrative, review, periodical, romantic, and genteel.” For the contest, there was no need to be prescriptive. Any kind of essay, if well executed, might've worked.Per usual, in our interview, Ned was gracious in his responses and brilliant in his breadth of references. That generosity of spirit rings through Part 3’s “An Essayist's Guide to Research and Family Life,” first written for the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Ned's nine enumerations for why to do research as an essayist include “Getting It Right,” “Time Travel,” “Adult Education,” and more, like “Being Alert to Life,” which Ned certainly was. The final piece for One by One, the Stars—“My Name Is Ned: Facebook and the Personal Essay”—features a panel presentation Ned delivered in 2011 when he explored how Facebook might facilitate essay discussions and even publications, but also how the medium might detract from our work. For as long as I knew him, Ned's Facebook use was prodigious, legendary. He used the platform to share and promote, to cheer on new essays by folks he knew and those he didn't, to celebrate the birthdays of great essayists. Even more impressive were the political debates he engaged in with his brother-in-law and a cast of right-wingers, each of whom he took seriously, all while Ned's left-wing writing community periodically chimed in. Ned took them seriously, too, engaging viewpoints, pointing out fallacies, pleading for humanity between all parties. Those Facebook skills, as well as Ned's organizing know-how, came in handy in 2012 when business-minded factions of higher education threatened to shutter the University of Missouri Press, which had just published Ned's book The American Essay in the American Century. Ned led the charge through a lively and proactive Facebook group, an e-mail campaign, and a traditional media presence that managed to save not only that university press, but the University of Akron Press in 2015, the University Press of Kentucky in 2018, and others along the way. Any university administration in the 2010s that threatened to defund its university press had Ned to reckon with. As a result, Ned became the inaugural winner of the Associated of University Presses Stand UP Award in 2020, a posthumous achievement that, like One by One, the Stars, solidifies Ned's legacy.As much as I enjoy One by One, the Stars and celebrate Ned's life while doing so, the book, as a posthumous collection, raises questions regarding the slippery line between author and editor. Of Ned's original manuscript, which covers Parts 1 and 2, Price's foreword notes, “Ned's familiar handwriting cover[ed] the pages. He had left extensive editing notes throughout, everything from sentence-level changes to follow-up research questions to plans for reshaping and rearranging the chapters.” All the same, while reading, I can't help but wonder whether Ned, in the end, would've made that particular choice, or included that particular piece. For example, the word “schizophrenic,” by my count, appears three times throughout the book in adjective form, an ableist construction I imagine Ned would've excised if given more time. Likewise, the fifth essay of Part 1, “Who Should be President in 1968?,” previously unpublished, is illuminating both to Ned's childhood nerdom as he sends questionnaires through the mail to significant cultural figures, and to the cultural climate of the time as he dissects their responses. The essay itself, however, feels bulkier than the rest, less well resolved. Likewise, Part II's lead-off essay, “The Edsel Farm,” made a lot more sense in terms of details, asides, and section endings once I realized it originally appeared in an anthology of essays about upstate New York. That anthology's editor, another friend and closer contemporary of Ned's, Bob Cowser, Jr., notes in his own review of the book for the Fourth Genre website, “The editors make little effort to eliminate repeated passages in the separate essays, reprinting all in previously published form, but the effect is to add emphasis to the themes that bind the collection.” While that may be true—and while those repeated passages do highlight Ned's fixations—I can't help but wonder what cuts and additions Ned might've made to smooth out the collection.The piece that still puzzles me most, the collection's penultimate essay, is Ned's infamous “Dear John” letter to John D'Agata. I happened to be there in attendance at AWP in 2012, in Chicago, when Ned stalked down the aisle fashionably late to a packed conference room. On that panel, with the help of the Fourth Genre book editor who predated him, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Ned delivered a methodical takedown of D'Agata's invented details in his lyric nonfiction, namely, The Lifespan of a Fact. “Dear John,” Ned begins, “I'm afraid it's over between us,” and then proceeds to pick apart the author's words. That afternoon in Chicago, during the Q&A, some of D'Agata's students from University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program came to his defense, accusing the panel and others that week of character assassination. I reviewed that panel for the Brevity Blog, perhaps adding to the lore as I claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that the panelists had “scrambled to shield themselves from AWP field guides-turned-projectiles.” Price's forward characterizes the Q&A as “a very loud debate” (Price's italics). Ned picked up on the thread, too, later in 2016, in the Los Angeles Review of Books when reviewing D'Agata's nonfiction anthologies. It's a companion piece, perhaps, to “Dear John,” and it might've been included in One by One, the Stars as such. In it, Ned stumbles upon an interview response where D'Agata references his “queer self.” Upon reflection, Ned writes,As a queer man long hesitant to acknowledge my own queer self, I tuned in closely to this section of Ned's review. I probably should've asked him about it during our e-mail interview, or even that day over beers in Washington, DC, but I wasn't out yet. I'd be out soon, but not yet.All the same, the end of that D'Agata review in the Los Angeles Review of Books takes on a strange, mocking tone as Ned invites D'Agata to collaborate with him on a collection of queer essays. Ned volunteers to include his own “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing” alongside any number of D'Agata's, even though Ned didn't belong to any LGBTQ+ communities. On matters of class, Ned was great. On queerness, he was still evolving, and I know he was striving to do better, because the issue came up the last time I saw Ned in person.The day after Ned and I had drinks in the hotel lobby at AWP in Washington, DC, we ran into each other at the book fair. I was with my girlfriend at the time, Raina, and I introduced her to Ned, saying, “This is Raina, my girlfriend.” With his characteristic grin, Ned said, “Hi, I'm Ned, Paul's boyfriend.” We all laughed—it was funny. Raina knew I was queer, though I wasn't publicly out, and I wasn't out to Ned, though maybe he knew something too. In the next breath he invited us to a panel he was on that afternoon, but Raina and I hesitated. We were MFA students, primarily there to represent Redivider, on break from classes and critical discussions, and we'd already made plans for drinks.I imagine Ned would've appreciated seeing us at his panel, would've loved to hear our voices in the Q&A. If I could do it again, I'd be there. Maybe Ned took our absence as a sign his “boyfriend” comment offended us. It hadn't, but there was something there—perhaps another blithe assumption, as with D'Agata before—and later that night, at 12:58 a.m., he sent me a message: “Sorry I slid into some sexist and homophobic cracks today. My bad. Raina seems very nice. Good to see you.”In the morning, Sunday, as we were packing for the airport, I sent Ned a message reassuring him that all was well. We loved him, we adored him, my friend and mentor. Later that summer came the news that he had cancer, though he underwent treatment and the prognosis was good. The next year I came out and married my husband, Peter, and though Ned couldn't travel to Boston for the wedding, he and Elizabeth were certainly invited. From then on, Ned signed his e-mails “Love to You and Peter.” And although I didn't see him in person for a while, we kept in touch, through Facebook and e-mail. And I was writing my third Fourth Genre book review early in 2019 when Ned told me his cancer had returned. Still, he gave me the same good edits, the same wealth of essays to consult, the same thoughtful ideas for expansion. A few months later, he was gone.We can't know, of course, what Ned's final collection would've looked like, how it might've differed from this one. And I recognize that the question itself, while inescapable, is also impossible. The full and final book Ned would've written simply doesn't exist. All the same, One by One, the Stars is a tremendous alternative to nothing. Like Ned himself, this collection is no less than a triumph.