Category: journal
dfw his legacy
DEATH IS NOT THE END:
David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics
By Jon Baskin
David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries, he labored to return literary fiction to the deep problems of subjective experience. Continue reading “dfw his legacy”
dfw
D.T. Max, “The Unfinished” The New Yorker, March 12, 2009
The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. Continue reading “dfw”
no
Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok
By Michiko Kakutani
September 14, 2008
David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer – his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness – to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life. Continue reading “no”