Immensely Sad
Posted on September 14th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
David Foster Wallace, one of our most talented and ambitious (in a literary sense) novelists, has committed suicide.
Wallace was one of the few modern writers who merited the hype that surrounded him. This is a real loss.
2 Responses
9/14/2008 8:05 pm
David Foster Wallace was a grad student in the philosophy department at Harvard for one semester, Fall ’89. I got to know him somewhat during his brief time in our program. He clearly had great gifts. At Amherst College, he had written two honors theses: one, in creative writing, became his first novel “The Broom of the System”; the other, in philosophy, was an extended analysis of Aristotle’s “sea-battle” argument about the truth-value of statements about future contingents. It became equally clear that semester that he was fighting some serious internal demons.
9/15/2008 2:06 am
I found this suicide really shocking, though obviously many who knew him did not. Very sad.