David Foster Wallace:

An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center

Biographical Sketch

David Foster Wallace was born February 2, 1962, in Ithaca, New York. His father, James Wallace, is a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, is an instructor in English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, Illinois. Amy Wallace Havens, Wallace’s younger sister, practices law in Tucson, Arizona. Wallace married artist Karen Green in 2004.

As an adolescent, Wallace played football and was a regionally ranked tennis player, but his interest in writing and language was influenced by his parents, who read Ulysses out loud to each other. His father read Moby-Dick to Wallace and his sister when they were only eight and six years old, and his mother would playfully pretend to have a coughing fit if one of the children made a usage error during supper conversation.

Wallace graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1985 with a double major in Philosophy and English. His philosophy senior thesis dealt with semantics and modal logic concerning Aristotle’s sea battle. His English senior thesis, around 700 pages and written in five months, turned into Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), which attracted positive attention and comparisons to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon. At Amherst, Wallace served for a time as managing editor of Sabrina, The Humor Magazine of Amherst College, and upon graduation he accepted a fellowship in the writing program at the University of Arizona, where he graduated with an M.F.A. in 1987. While a graduate student, Wallace met Bonnie Nadell, a literary agent in San Francisco, who read an excerpt of The Broom of the System that Wallace had submitted to her agency. Nadell took on Wallace as a client, establishing a professional and personal relationship that lasted the rest of his life.

Wallace followed The Broom of the System with the collection of short stories Girl With Curious Hair (1988), and he next published a nonfiction work with co-author Mark Costello titled Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990), which received a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1991. Infinite Jest (1996), a massive 1,079 page novel, cemented his reputation as a formidable literary figure. His other major works include A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Up, Simba! (2000), Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003), Oblivion (2004), and Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (2005). Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was adapted for film in 2009.

In addition to the shorter pieces in his collected works, Wallace authored dozens of stories, non-fiction articles, and book reviews for, among others, the Amherst Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Poetry in Review, Rolling Stone, Salon.com, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, and numerous anthologies. He was the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award in 1987; a Yaddo residency fellowship in 1987 and 1989; a John Traine Humor Prize in 1988 for "Little Expressionless Animals"; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1989; an Illinois Arts Council Award for Nonfiction in 1989 for "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"; a Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award in Fiction in 1991 for Girl with Curious Hair; a National Magazine Award finalist in 1995 for "Ticket to the Fair" and in 1997 for "David Lynch Keeps His Head"; a Lannan Foundation Award for Literature in 1996 and 2000; and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1997-2002. He was named Outstanding University Researcher, Illinois State University, in 1998 and 1999.

Having suffered from anxiety attacks since his late teens, Wallace was diagnosed with clinical depression during his sophomore year at Amherst. He struggled with the condition for the rest of his life, and after a particularly rough period during which his usual medication was no longer effective, Wallace killed himself on September 12, 2008, at his home in California. His final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, is scheduled for publication in 2011 by Little, Brown and Company under the guidance of his long-time editor Michael Pietsch. Wallace worked at the Internal Revenue Service and took accounting classes in preparation for the novel, which focuses on the employees of an IRS office.

Scope and Contents

The David Foster Wallace Papers document all but one of Wallace’s major works, and many of his shorter works. The major works represented are: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999); The Broom of the System (1987); Consider the Lobster, And Other Essays (2005); Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003); Girl with Curious Hair (1989); Infinite Jest (1996); Oblivion: Stories (2004); The Pale King, scheduled for publication in 2011; and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997). McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express (2008) is documented with two previously published short versions titled "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub," and "Up, Simba."  Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990), coauthored by Wallace and Mark Costello, is Wallace’s only major work without representation. See the Index of Works for a complete listing of all titles in the papers.

The papers are organized into three series: I. Works, 1984-2006, undated; II. Personal and Career-related, 1971-2008, undated; and III. Copies of Works by Don DeLillo, undated. Series I. has been subdivided into two subseries: A. Novels and Collections, 1987-2006, undated and B. Short Works, 1984-2006, undated. All of the materials are in English.

Series I. makes up the bulk of the collection and includes handwritten notes and drafts, notebooks, interview notes, research materials, typescript drafts, proofs, and promotional materials. Some works are represented by as little as a single uncorrected typescript, but other works, such as Everything and More, provide comprehensive documentation of Wallace’s full creative process with research materials, notebooks, handwritten drafts, original and revised typescript drafts, annotated and corrected 1st, 2nd, and 3rd pass copyedited drafts, and related correspondence. The majority of the typewritten drafts contain significant annotations and corrections by Wallace, often in different color inks for subsequent passes through a particular draft. Also present are Wallace’s many comments, frequently humorous and often written on sticky notes attached to the transcripts, written to the people involved in the various stages of editing.

Series II. contains personal and professional records including teaching materials, childhood schoolwork, and college awards, essays, and exams. Also present are some personal journal pages, a “midwesternisms” notebook, and research materials such as handwritten entomology notes.

Series III. consists solely of photocopy typescripts of three works by Don DeLillo, one of which, Underworld, contains extensive handwritten annotations by Wallace.

A relatively small amount of correspondence is in the papers, and what is present is almost entirely work-related between Wallace and his editors, fact-checkers, etc. All incoming letters are listed in an Index of Correspondents. The majority of Wallace’s papers are in excellent condition, with only a few items requiring preservation photocopying and/or special housing.

Additional materials related to The Pale King are expected at the Ransom Center sometime in 2011 after publication of the novel.

Restrictions

Access:

Open for research

Related Material

Separated Material

Administrative Information

Acquisition:

Purchase, 2009 (2009-11-11-P)

Processed by:

Stephen Cooper, 2010

Sources:

Container List

 Index of Correspondents 

 Index of Works