Author David Foster Wallace Passes Away
Celebrated Writer Commits Suicide Leaving Literary Legacy Behind
Sep 18, 2008
On September 12, 2008 the world lost another writer, the insightful postmodern author David Foster Wallace. From bustling metaphors to pages worth of footnotes, Wallace was a writer full of innovation who earned the respect of both his literary peers and his audience by simply doing what is was he did best. Here is an overview of the great writer and what he accomplished in his 46 years of life that made him one-of-a-kind.
David Foster Wallace's Novels
As far as novels go, Wallace is best known for his ambitious 1000-plus page novel Infinite Jest (1996). This novel alone contained over 300 footnotes that comprised almost 100 pages of text, quite an innovative undertaking for a fiction novel. Infinite Jest takes place in a futuristic version of the US and centers around a movie (also called Infinite Jest) that has an almost hypnotizing effect on its viewers, rendering them unable to engage in any other activities other than watching the film. The book also incorporates the oddly paired elements of addiction, abuse, depression, product advertising, and tennis.
Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), is slightly less complicated, far shorter and involves a switchboard operator, Lenore, her grandmother who disappears from her nursing home, a crazed boyfriend and a pet bird who has discovered how to speak in obscenities. While this may sound a bit disjointed, Wallace's style shines and pulls the story together in a feat of literary accomplishment.
David Foster Wallace's Short Stories & Essays
Wallace was a frequent contributor to such magazines as Harper's, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Gourmet, and Esquire, where he covered a wide variety of topics ranging from 9/11 and politics ("The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub") to lobster festivals ("Consider the Lobster") and cruise ship vacations (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again/"Shipping Out").
While most would agree that Wallace's writings were anything but short, he had a way with molding a set of seemingly random topics like tennis, math and tornadoes ("Tennis, Trigonometry and Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood") into a cohesive piece of writing that makes perfect sense. A common denominator of all his journalistic writing was his ability to draw himself into the story in a way that makes the reader still walk away from the piece having learned about the subject at hand, as well as a little more about the man behind the byline.
In addition to writing, Wallace taught creative writing and English at Pomona College in California where he was recognized by the college's president David Oxtoby as a "brilliant teacher who worked so tirelessly to teach his young writers how to think and how to be serious in their engagement with the world".
In a 2005 commencement speech given at Kenyon College, Wallace alludes to the cliché of one's mind being a "terrible master" and that in order to succeed to any degree in the world one must learn how to "exercise some control over how and what you think". While only in hindsight can the foreshadowing of tragic events be anticipated, it is almost ironic that the man was able to so clearly express his own demons for the sake of putting them in perspective for others.
While it is easy to categorize Wallace into the same group of emotionally tortured and depressively driven authors because of how he decided to end his own life, it is important that he be remembered for the work of genius that he produced and not the "slave" to "the terrible master" he became due to his illness. Anyone who reads Wallace is certain to re-examine the way they think about even the most mundane of things, and in the end isn't that what all great writers aim to do?
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