Michigan Quarterly Review, founded in 1962, is the University of Michigan's flagship journal, publishing each season a collection of essays, interviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and book reviews. Since 1979, when an issue called "The Moon Landing and Its Aftermath" appeared, one issue each year has been entirely devoted to a special theme. Some of MQR's most recent special issues are "Vietnam: Beyond the Frame," "The Documentary Imagination," and "China." In the last two decades MQR has published work by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coles, Carol Gilligan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barry Lopez, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Rorty, Eric J. Sundquist, John Updike, William Julius Wilson, and other authorities in their fields, as well as some of the finest contemporary fiction and poetry.

MQR is, as we like to say, more than a literary magazine. Unlike most of the academy-based journals in this country, which publish literary materials exclusively, MQR reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the University of Michigan and publishes writings in a wide variety of research areas. It must be emphasized that authors in MQR use clear prose, free of jargon, to present their arguments. All writings in the journal are accessible to intellectual readers, however complex the topics they undertake.

In the inaugural issue of MQR back in 1962 the first editor, Sheridan Baker, subtitled the journal "A Magazine of University Perspectives and General Intelligence" and commented, "If we can make the university universal, the intellect amiable, and the magazine readable, we shall rest content." It remains the goal of MQR to forge a strong relationship between the best writers and the most demanding audience in our society. Because the journal has been able to attract such excellent writers, and because its contents are so often reprinted in prize anthologies, textbooks, and magazines such as Harper's and The Utne Reader, as well as coursepacks, we believe that MQR fulfills in each issue the hopes of its founder and the expectations of its loyal readers.

• The Editor
• The Managing Editor