David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was an American novelist and essayist whose Infinite Jest and his essay collections attempted to re-enchant fiction in the face of postmodern irony, at enormous personal cost.

David Foster Wallace arrived in American letters with The Broom of the System (1987), a debut that showed genuine promise without quite announcing the scale of his ambition. Infinite Jest (1996) announced it without equivocation. The novel — 1,079 pages including nearly a hundred pages of footnotes, set in a near-future North America defined by waste, addiction, and entertainment — is one of the most audacious attempts in postwar American fiction to use the novel form to diagnose a cultural moment. It is also genuinely funny, moving, and structurally intricate in ways that reward multiple readings.

His nonfiction was sometimes better — or at least easier to love. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are essay collections that combine ferocious intelligence with a quality of honest self-examination rare in literary journalism. The title essay of the former, about a week on a cruise ship, is among the funniest and most devastating pieces of American cultural criticism of its era.

The Pale King, published posthumously in 2011 from the manuscript Wallace left at his death by suicide in 2008, is about boredom — specifically, the boredom of IRS audit work — used as a lens for exploring what sustained attention really requires of us. It is unfinished and brilliant in alternating chapters. Wallace’s influence on a generation of American writers has been immense and sometimes regrettable; the imitations tend to get the difficulty without the humanity that makes the difficulty worthwhile.