Happy Birthday, Ned Stuckey-French
Born February 22, 1950, West Lafayette, IN | Died June 28, 2019, Tallahassee, FL
Today, the Best American Essays newsletters marks the seventy-fifth birthday of essayist, teacher, and nonfiction scholar and editor Ned Stuckey-French.
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“I think the problem of writing essays is the same as it’s always been. Our form was split at the root. In the beginning there was Montaigne and Bacon, so the choice for an essayist has perhaps to do with those two guys and their examples. Are you a Montaignean (digressive, skeptical, personal, tentative, conversational, open, etc.) or are you a Baconian (impersonal, instructive, closed, aphoristic, polished, etc.)? That comparison is reductive, of course, but I do think those strains have always twined their way through the essay tradition.
“But what about 2017? What is different now? What is the nature of the essay in our moment? I have been thinking about this. It’s an exciting time. The essay, once seen as dead or moribund, some stuffy, belletristic relic of the nineteenth century or a service genre used by composition teachers, has definitely had a revival.”
“[Theodor]Adorno was attracted to the essay as a genre because, as he put it, the essay “proceeds so to speak methodically unmethodically,” “the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy,” and the “essay shies away from the violence of dogma.” I agree with him. I like the essay because it is about following your thinking wherever it might go and questioning yourself and your presuppositions along the way.”
Select nonfiction bibliography:
The American Essay in the American Century, University of Missouri Press, 2011.
as co-editor with Carl H. Klaus, Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, University of Iowa Press, 2012.
One by One the Stars. Essays, University of Georgia Press, 2022.
“The Anthologies of John D’Agata,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017.
“Object Lesson: Dinah Lenney and the Essayist’s Dilemma,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2014.
“Good Fences,” Guernica, 2009.
Essays by Ned Stuckey-French listed in Notables in The Best American Essays (BAE):
“Don't Be Cruel: An Argument for Elvis,” The Normal School, 2012 (BAE 2013).
“Nightmares,” New South, 2011, (BAE 2012).
“South Side,” The Pinch, 2006 (BAE 2007).
“Termites,” The Missouri Review, 1996 (BAE 1997).
See also:
Read “On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay,” Carl H. Klaus, Assay Journal, 2019.
Read an interview with Ned Stuckey-French in The Woven Tale Press, 2017.
Read “Saving the University of Missouri Press,” Johns Hopkins University Press blog, 2012.