Monday, September 15, 2008

NYT Obituary on David Foster Wallace

The New York Times has published a moving obituary:
A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

Well worth reading here.
His parents confirmed that he was suffering from terrible depression, that he had been hospitalized over the summer and had tried numerous therapies, to no avail.

I hope and pray he's gone to a better place.

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