I am devastated to read this.  David Foster Wallace was my favorite living author, and Infinite Jest my favorite contemporary novel.  Of all the people in the world I would have chosen to meet, David Foster Wallace was just about the highest.  I don't know what else to say, other than that I had no idea that someone who could write so beautifully about humanity's search for happiness could have had so little of it himself.

May he rest in peace.

A few years ago, I was very briefly a colleague of his, and was shocked at the news on the radio this morning.

I, too, had a professional connection to the man, albeit a tangential one, and I've taught his nonfiction in essay courses many times. I'd heard through mutual acquaintances that he was prone to dark nights and days of the soul, but I am nonetheless stunned by this news. No American writer that I can think of, certainly no American of DFW's generation that I can think of, could swing so acrobatically among registers of diction, feeling, tone, or, even,  consciousness.

Perhaps those of us who were fans could share passages. I'll offer something that isn't really from his work at all but which I find poignant now, characteristically self-deprecating and antic and footnoted. It comes from the contributor's note he wrote, when his acclaim was just beginning, for the Best American Short Stories 1992, his first appearance in that anthology (B.A.S.S., Foster Wallace calls it. Robert Stone, the anthology's editor, selected DFW's "Forever Overhead," a second person interior monologue from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old kid standing--for what seems like forever--at the end of a diving board. Here's what DFW says  in his contributor's note, his "wordy little confession":

"This is a bit embarrassing, and I'd rather not discuss it, but will, since certain authorities have been polite but firm about these little post-story discussions being strongly encouraged, and I'd probably submit with cheer to way more embarrassing requirements if it meant getting the old snout into the B.A.S.S. trough.

"The embarrassing issue here is I'm not all that crazy about this story. It's one of few autobiographically implicated things I've ever tried. I did, like probably lots of kids, have a high-dive trauma. My real trauma was much more plain-old-sphincter-loosening-fear-based than the existential conundra that this story's kid encounters. I basically got to the top, with a long line of jaded souls behind me, and changed my mind about going off. It was excruciatingly shaming, but in no way deeply or exceptionally shaming. I think it was the memory of the shame so much as current shame that allowed so pedestrian a shame to still haunt my esteem-centers, prompting me to make the story so heavy, meditative, image-laden, swinging for the fence on just about every pitch. The thing seems to me a performative index of every weakness I have as a writer and as a person. And God knows why I let my desire for an Alienated Narrative Persona lead me to use the second-person point of view; now I'm scared people will read this and think I'm just some McInerney imitator in a black turtleneck, a copy of Kierkegaard under my arm.

"The thing went through dozens of drafts, the first of which still sits in the pages of my undergraduate 'Stories That'll Prove I'm a Genius' notebook. . . . I'm noticing that, with respect to any piece of fiction, my dissatisfaction with the final draft is directly proportional to the excitement that precedes the first draft. I remember doing the tortured artist thing back in school, all ego and caffeine, and thinking I had a genuine Big Idea for this story here, and seeing it finished, Big, published, lauded as Important by bearded titans. This was before I even bothered to start to try writing the thing. I preconceived it as deeply moving and imposingly cerebral at the same time, at once tender-psyche'd and tough-minded, just the sort of thing Eminences would pluck out of the glabrous herd by choosing for a prestigious anthology. By the second draft, my head was more or less permanently attached to the wall I'd been pounding it on. In black-lit contrast to the timelessly Big thing, I'd preconceived, the actual ink-on-paper story seemed pretentious and trendy and jejune and any number of bad things: it seemed like the product of a young writer who was ashamed of a personal trauma and who was straining with every fast-twitch fiber to make that trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could every really be. And here I mean 'true' both artistically and historically.

"I don't know why I kept putting the thing through drafts. I kept getting late-night twinges of that original preconceptual excitement. I kept seeing the thing as maybe just one image or two epiphanies away from blossoming, from honoring its entelechy of Bigness. Six years and many other completed projects later, I sent this story out in the old brown envelope. I sent it out for the same reason most young writers I know send stuff out: to have an excuse to quit thinking about it. My surprise when _Fiction International_ took the thing was nothing compared to my feelings about the august endorsement that occasions this wordy little confession. Do not get me wrong: qualms about the story's failure to be anything more than a lumpy ghost of what I remain convinced was its initial promise of Bigness have not inhibited me from calling pretty much everybody I know and casually working in the B.A.S.S.-selection news. I'm extremely and yet of course also humbly grateful and moved and etc. I'm just coming to realize that I have very little personal clue about whether the stuff I do is good or bad or successful or not successful* which like most bits of self-knowledge is both mortifying and kind of a relief. It makes me glad I have opinionated critical friends and politely firm editors, not necessarily in that order."

" *Is 'successful' the same as 'good,' here? Does inclusion in B.A.S.S. render a story de facto 'good' the way a human reverend's pronouncement effects a legally binding union?"

I was unfamiliar with his fiction but loved and was deeply impressed by the two pieces of non-fiction I'd read. One was an article on the debate about how words should be defined in the dictionary (usage vs. authority), and the other was his history of the mathematical and logical concept of infinity, "Everything and More." The latter was particularly impressive because Wallace wasn't a formally trained mathematician, but a fairly serious hobbyist. He became interested, according to the book, because he'd been lousy at it in high school, but was intrigued.  Given the uninformed hostility so many lit and humanities students have for math and the sciences, and hell, knowledge generally, that  kind of voracious curiosity was enough to make you love him.  I've heard more than one twerp with a little continental phil. under his/her belt, and not much else, dismiss entire fields of knowledge, admonishing that people should be more critical. Great counterparts to the global-warming, aids and evolution denialists out there.. Surprisingly non of the obituaries I've read so far even mention the literary icon's facility with math. It's the one area a lot of  otherwise generally knowledgeable people are afraid to tackle. What little Wallace I've read was unusually enjoyable and engrossing. I guess it's time to pick up "Infinite Jest". He'll be sorely missed.

Jason and anyone else looking for DFW's work on-line: all of his contributions to Harper's--where most of his best nonfiction appeared, along with several short stories--are available free to subscribers of the magazine at www.harpers.org. I imagine Harper's will make some of DFW's best work available to the non-subscribing public in coming days.

Such tragic events make one wonder if the suicide rate among writers higher than the population as a whole, or even more than other artists.  Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Sylvia Plath, Jerzy Kosinski, Jerzy Kosinski, etc.

Wikipedia actually has a category listing nearly 300 writers who died by their own hand.  The equivalent section for artists only lists 67.  Even the actor list is only 125.

Is the agony of self-doubt much higher for writers than for any other creative artist?  Is staring at the blank page equivalent to staring into the abyss?

A great loss. Go to theatlantic.com for a really good piece he did for their "The American Idea" issue, and links. You don't have to be a subscriber.

I was shocked and terribly saddened to hear of his death.  He was a wonderful writer and I always read his stuff first when my issue of Harper's arrived.  I always perked up a little when I saw his name on the cover.  A sad moment and my heart goes out to his widow.

Sobbed all day.

Here's a good one available to all for free.

www.nytimes.com/.../20federer.html

As for his fiction, well, it's fair to say the universe is a slightly more interesting place for Infinite Jest having been written, but like everyone else I've met who cracked the book in the first place, I was unable to finish it.  When I bought the thing the bookstore clerk said, "Great book!  I'm reading it myself.  Well, actually I decided to take a break from it, but it's really great."

Another of DFW's achievements: having merrited being satirized in The Onion.

www.theonion.com/.../27769

Suicide's a bloody shame, no matter how you slice it, though.  I'm sad to see the man leave the scene.  He had a lot left in him I reckon.

Only Wallace I've read was "Everything and More."  Didn't do the math justice.

I did finish Infinite Jest. After 8 months. Only to realize the book only makes sense if you read it twice.

Maddening. Brilliant. Maddeningly brilliant. And brilliantly mad.

Such a sad day.

emigdio, I was equivocal about Infinite Jest the first time.  I read it again recently, and I loved it so much more.  (It took me months and months both times.)  It was worth it.

I spent almost $100 at Barnes and Noble buying all the DFW books I hadn't read yesterday.

For a delightful sample of DFW's nonfiction writing, see his New York Times essay on Roger Federer:

www.nytimes.com/.../20federer.html

TNR's former editor James Wood was always pretty hard on DFW. Why not post some of those reviews?

The Times's obituary hit the right note I think: He was best when he was edited or working against the confines of something like a nonfiction assignment.

Sorry to see him take his own life.

Last year (in his introduction to the Best American Essays book), he used the term "total noise" to describe, in part, "a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value."   As he was in that piece, DFW has been the one voice I have sought out for the past 15 years......I was going to say, to make sense of things, but that does not quite capture it.  It is more like he was able, without me knowing exactly where he was going, to examine an impossibly complex morass of events and emotions and sensibly reorder and restack them and leave me admiring the result--often revisiting them, years after.  I have re-read no writer of fiction or essay more than DFW.

I had several things in common with him which make his death somehow closer to me--same age, same profession, same home state, a mutual acquaintance, interests in sport.  He worked up the road from me in Claremont--a place I visit often and thought might suit him perfectly--since it is a beautiful, low-key campus with great students and faculty and an almost Normal Rockwell-like small town environment, yet very close to Los Angeles.  But this is me imagining I knew what suited him, which I honestly know no more than why he would have ended his life.  Sad, confused, lost.

oneillsdc10 writes: "TNR's former editor James Wood was always pretty hard on DFW. Why not post some of those reviews?"

Yes, and perhaps when Wood dies, alongside its obituary the Times could run Walter Kirn's review of Wood's latest, which appeared in the Book Review last August and concluded as follows: "For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona. 'How Fiction Works' is a definitive title, promising much and presuming even more: that anyone, in the age of made-up memoirs and so-called novels whose protagonists share their authors’ biographies and names, still knows what fiction is; that those who do know agree that it resembles a machine or a device, not a mess, a mystery or a miracle; and that once we know how fiction works, we’ll still care about it as an art form rather than merely admire it as an exercise. But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap."

Don't get me wrong, I admire Wood, a judicious, honorable critic, from whom I've learned a great deal and who almost never makes this reader take a nap. Just saying.

Like that of many--all?--brilliant people, Foster Wallace's brilliance had its lapses and excesses, of which it seems he himself was all too aware. But I think the terms Kirn applies to fiction in general would judiciously describe Wallace's best work--a mess, a mystery, a miracle. Time, I suppose, will tell.