excerpt from The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky in Rolling Stone Magazine October 30, 2008.Īmong Wallace's honors were a Whiting Writers Award (1987), a Lannan Literary Award (1996), a Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction (1997), a National Magazine Award (2001), three O. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California's Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.' Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness. My job is to make some sense of it.' He wanted to write 'stuff about what it feels like to live. 'I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today,' he once said, 'of which maybe 25 are important. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation.

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