David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.
Posted by: Keir Graff
David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest (1996), has died, an apparent suicide (“David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46,” by Bruce Weber, New York Times):
In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”
James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.
“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
January 29th, 2010 at 10:03 am
[...] and pervasive legacies of any great writer of the twentieth century. When John Updike passed, when David Foster Wallace died, word spread among the hallways pretty quickly at Booklist. But this is something else altogether. [...]