Obit and Lit: Mourning David Foster Wallace

On Friday, September 13th, David Foster Wallace died at age 46. Yesterday’s New York Times published an article, nay, a sort of elegy, to Wallace, by writer A. O. Scott.

Scott does an excellent job of situating Wallace in his generation of great minds, and in the broader scheme of literary innovation, comparing Wallace’s role in post-modernism to Ezra Pound’s in modernism.

To say Wallace will be missed is a vast understatement. To borrow from Scott, “He will be terribly missed by those of us who were lost with him in the maze of self-consciousness and self-doubt. He illuminated the maze brilliantly, even if he couldn’t show us the way out.”