(((I hope people don't think too harshly of this poor guy...
he shouldn't have done it, because a week later his crisis probably would have all seemed funny.)))
(((This is a kind of occupational hazard for guys like him – it's like watching a gymnast break his neck.)))
Link: Writer David Foster Wallace found dead - Los Angeles Times.
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.
Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester. (((You know what really helps with this? A hobby.
Something that ISN'T 'creative writing.')))Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.
"What was a party is now a wake," Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away.
"He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," Ulin said.
"He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late '80s and early 1990s," Ulin said. "And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything."
Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in "The Broom of the System," his 1987 debut novel; "Girl With Curious Hair," a 1989 collection of short stories, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997). In 1997, he also received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. (((Yeah, he was a genius. The woods are full of 'em, folks.)))
A year earlier he shot to the top of the literary world with "Infinite Jest," a sprawling, ambitious novel with a nonlinear plot that ran 1,079 pages and had nearly as many footnotes.
Critics marveled at the prodigious talent evident in his imaginative take on a future world, comparing him to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving.
In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, "Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone." (...)
