To echo some basic points made quite often-no, it doesn't pack the same punch as Infinite Jest, of course-pretty much nothing does. Regardless of any of its debut-novel flaws, these extra-textual facts should help to compel most who've read this unique, relentlessly funny and youthfully ambitious book. He began writing it fresh out of a fairly tumultuous mental health crisis at age 22 (or as he put it 'a young 22') while simultaneously writing a highly technical philosophy thesis at Amherst in order to graduate with a double major in philosophy and English. It was 1986 and he was 24 years old when it was published. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction.' So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. 'I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn't augur real well for my longevity. Henry Awards (1988, 1999, 2002), and a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant. excerpt from The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky in Rolling Stone Magazine October 30, 2008.Īmong Wallace's honors were a Whiting Writers Award (1987), a Lannan Literary Award (1996), a Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction (1997), a National Magazine Award (2001), three O. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California's Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.' Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness. My job is to make some sense of it.' He wanted to write 'stuff about what it feels like to live. 'I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today,' he once said, 'of which maybe 25 are important. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys.

David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation.

The broom of the system