Tragic

Sad to hear that David Foster Wallace killed himself Friday. Salon's Troy Patterson writes:

Wallace's autobiographical I...was frequently to be seen sweating heavily in its nervousness, a condition exacerbated by its frequent worrying about serving the reader by working to get at that most un-Postmodern abstraction: the truth.

...there is an impulse—wholly human and totally ghoulish—to rifle through the work in search of clues and cries and suicide footnotes, and in the case of Wallace, the rifling requires no strain. Like any smart writer aspiring to greatness, despair was a regular theme, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing …" got some of its considerable energy from the author's association of "the ocean with dread and death."

Laura Miller adds that:

the one imperative that runs throughout all of his work is the intimate connection between humility and wisdom.