38 David Foster Wallace Essays, Articles, Biography and Interviews

For me, David Foster Wallace always and will always rhyme together with Infinite Jest, the lengthy and complex work of this legendary writer, author, educator and philosopher. When published in early 1996, Infinite Jest page count came up to an amazing 1,079 pages, rumoured to have taken 2 and a half to 3 years to complete. A definitely challenging book to get through, we’ve created a video – “10 Tips on How to Read Infinite Jest“, so those who’re struggling, we hope this could lend a hand on how to brave it through. Enough of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace was called one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years. He influenced and greatly inspired many other authors such as Dave Eggers, George Saunders and many others.

His very first novel was published in 1987 under the title “The Broom of the System”, a story about a 24-year-old telphone switchboard operator who questions her own reality. 9 years after that, Infinite Jest was borned, and The Pale King followed 5 years later, published posthumously in unfinished form. Wallace had also written 9 non-fictions within a 22 year span, which were essays and books. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for “The Pale King” in 2012, won Time magazine’s Best Books of the Year, Salon Book Award, Lannan Literary Award and a lot more.

David Foster Wallace, commited suicide in 2008 by handing himself from a rafter of his house. He suffered and fought a major depressive disorder for more than 20 years. He was 46. He had a special connection with dogs and even spoken of opening a shelter for stray dogs. In March 2010, the University of Texas at Austin purchased Wallace’s drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest. In January 2017, the International David Foster Wallce Society and the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies were launched. He will be remembered dearly for all his amazing work in the past.

Related – Essays by Famous Authors

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

The materials below are mostly essays, with a small number covering his past interviews, and other biographical articles written by other authors. Harpers.org has all of Wallace’s work in a nicely formatted PDF download, but the rest are available for online reading only. We hope you enjoy this long list of essays, articles, biography and interviews.

1. 9/11: The View From the Midwest (Online)
2. Big Red Son (PDF)
3. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (PDF)
4. Consider the Lobster (Online)
5. David Foster Wallace Interviewed by Dave Eggers by The Believer (Online)
6. David Foster Wallace, In His Own Words (Online – David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College)
7. David Lynch Keeps His Head (Online)
8. Deciderization 2007 (PDF)
9. E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction (Online)
10. Everything is Green (PDF)
11. Federer as Religious Experience (Online)
12. Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young (PDF)
13. FX Porn (Online)
14. God Wielded the Buzzer by Christian Lorentzen (Online – On a biography of David Foster Wallace)
15. Grammar Lessons From David Foster Wallace: Twenty-Four Word Notes (Online)
16. Host (Online)
17. Incarnations of Burned Children (Online)
18. Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library by Maria Bustillos (Online)
19. Just Asking (Online)
20. Late Night: David Foster Wallace’s First Published Fiction For a Major National Magazine (Online)
21. Laughing With Kafka (PDF)
22. Rabbit Resurrected (PDF)
23. Shipping Out (PDF)
24. Signifying Rappers (Online)
25. Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes (PDF)
26. Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage (PDF)
27. The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems (PDF)
28. The Capital T Truth (Online)
29. The Compliance Branch (PDF)
30. The Depressed Person (PDF)
31. The Nature of the Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write (Online)
32. The String Theory (Online)
33. The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass ‘Infinite Jest.’ by D. T. Max (Online)
34. The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and The Shrub (Online)
35. Ticket to the Fair (PDF)
36. Too Much Information: On David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, and His Legacy by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Online)
37. What words really mean: David Foster Wallace’s dictionary (Online)
38. Why Didn’t Video Phones Take Off? (Online)