Articles by Mayukh Sen. D.F.W.'s Favorite Grammarian. What would David Foster Wallace have made of “Quack This Way,” the recent publication of a 2006 interview he gave on grammar and usage? D.F.W. was first and foremost a writer, and one who mistrusted substituting talk for the more careful arrangements of the page. Interviews with him are full of his misgivings that questions are coming too fast and asking for answers that are too short.
Yet “Quack This Way” is the fourth posthumous publication of the impromptu oral D.F.W. First was David Lipsky’s transcription of his 1996 road trip with the writer; next was a volume in the “Conversations With” series from the University Press of Mississippi, then “The Last Interview” (much overlap with the foregoing), and, finally, this discussion with Bryan Garner, a usage expert, conducted in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2006. For readers, I think it’s almost entirely a good thing. Our worries are not D.F.W.’s. Which may be why, in 2006, Wallace agreed to a videotaped hotel-room interview. D.T. Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library. "Humility—the acceptance that being human is good enough—is the embrace of ordinariness.
" —underlined by David Foster Wallace in his copy of Ernest Kurtz's The Spirituality of Imperfection. "True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. " —David Foster Wallace, The Pale King Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page.
Wallace committed suicide in 2008. One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. All his life, he'd been the smartest boy in class, the gifted athlete, the super brain, the best writer. But Wallace had already learned to mistrust such praise. Mrs. Life and Letters: The Unfinished: Reporting & Essays. 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. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and “Everything and More,” a history of infinity.
Depression often figured in his work. Wallace’s death was followed by four public memorial services, celebrations of his work in newspapers and magazines, and tributes on the Web. He was only forty-six when he killed himself, which helped explain the sense of loss readers and critics felt. So Wallace’s project required him to invent a language and a stance of his own. He began to write fiction. Exquisite Corpse - Journal of Letters and Life - From: Susan Silas To: David Foster Wallace, January 2009.