David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)

With two novels, The Broom of the System, and then the astounding Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace almost single-handedly redrew a literary landscape until then dominated by the dirty realist fiction of Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Bret Easton Ellis. With Infinite Jest, Wallace found his intricate, playfully ironic footing, slicing and dicing his way through a meditation on the subject of addiction in every conceivable fashion—more than once Wallace resembled a ventriloquist who talks out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. But that doorstop of a novel full of footnotes and labyrinthine sentences was much more than style. Its generous spirit rekindled the idea that, in the right hands, the art of fiction was still capable of almost anything. At his death, what he had completed of a third novel was left, neatly stacked, on his desk. It would serve as suicide note, and as bequest. It was all we would have of this impossibly talented, tragically afflicted writer, and more than we ever had reason to hope for.