David Foster Wallace.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)

David Foster Wallace, who died on September 12th, at the age of forty-six, was in many ways a writer of his time. "Infinite Jest," a 1,079-page literary manifesto that was also a piercingly funny, inventive, and deeply moving novel about tennis, film theory, Alcoholics Anonymous, Quebecois separatism, and differential calculus, made him a cause celebre when it was published, in 1996, and spawned whole schools of fiction writers eager to emulate his dense, footnote-and-endnote-riddled, riffing, colloquial style. But Wallace was also a throwback to another time--when the romantic vision of the writer was of a recluse, living far from the capital, struggling through his manuscript in the privacy of his own study, and emerging years later with a masterpiece. He was a private person, modest and genuinely self-deprecating. (He signed his letters with smiley faces long before emoticons existed.) Of one of the manuscripts he sent to this magazine, he wrote, "I cut it heavily twice, for the basic reason that what I want here is the appearance or impression of brutality without actually being brutal or painful to read (you should have seen the last draft…), but it's still hard on the cortex." Wallace, a self-proclaimed Midwesterner, who grew up in central Illinois and taught for ten years at Illinois State University, liked to use words like "neat" and "gooey," and was, for years, inseparable from his bandanna, and yet--educated at Amherst and, for a time, a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard--he could also title a story "Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI)," write a technical text on the history of infinity in mathematics, and thread his take-downs of pop culture with metaphysics.

Wallace's talent was a generous one--each book or story or piece of journalism seemed to overflow with words. He had much to say, many ways in which to say it, and many ways of commenting on what he had just said. He also had a determination and a confidence in his work that extended to every comma and ...