Running for Your Life: If the Great Were With Us Thursday

These days of Facebook selfies and gasping self-promotion in all facets of the creative life pause a moment to reflect on a pre-iPhone great, David Foster Wallace.

On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of his ambitious tour de force, “Infinite Jest,” consider this piece of journalism  by The New Yorker’s D.T Max about the inherent character of this literary original. (Wallace committed suicide in 2008. He was 46 years old.)

“[Wallace] told most people that he did not use e-mail, but he gave his students an address. Sections of “Infinite Jest” began to appear in magazines, but he downplayed his growing fame as a writer. Doug Hesse, a colleague, made the mistake of praising an essay of Wallace’s. “He did this gesture of wiping the butt with one hand and pointing to his mouth with the other,” Hesse remembers. “I learned really really quickly not to go beyond the equivalent of ‘How’s the weather?’ ”

“Downplaying his growing fame as a writer”? There may be those who say a man who enjoyed the kind of fame that Wallace did in the last decade of his life could afford to be dismissive of the trappings that come with being a household name. Still, imagine if this great were with us, how instructive of a role model he would be for exposing the emptiness of fame in our modern world.


Next: Running for Your Life: What’s to Read?