RIP David Foster Wallace

I'm not deeply versed in his canon or anything, but I've been greatly affected by what I've come across and was surprised at how bummed I was reflecting on news of his death. Plenty of blogs and newspapers are filling up with eloquent obituaries so please go check a few of them out. The obit on salon gives a good general account of the sort of writer he was, if not an exhaustive survey of his contributions (which would be nearly impossible in a reasonable space, he was so prolific).

Wallace was probably a genius, Infinite Jest making with Ulysses intimidating literary bookends for the 20th century. More than an entertaining writer, he was engaged with the world. He wanted us to reclaim language for communication beyond amusement; he appreciated irony but feared that it was subverting our ability to be brave in making connections with each other. His writing is both rich in craft and a vector for important ideas; it is technically overwhelming and often prodigiously long, but not imprecise, usually hilarious, occasionally profound, and possibly hopeful, as no one would give us anything like that without suspecting that we deserved it. I don't know what he was like as a person, but he was clearly a man of enormous intellectual generosity. It is good news for us that such people can exist at all; and as they are rare it's sad that we have such a hard time keeping them here.