David Foster Wallace Suicide (Photos)

Writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself. Wallace’s body was found by his wife, Karen Green, around 9:30 p.m. when she returned home. David Foster Wallace, author of “Infinite Jest”, written in 1996 is dead at 46. Such a tragedy for such a talented writer such as David Foster Wallace to commit suicide.

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Karen Green, Wallace’s wife, returned home around 9:30 Friday evening, to find her husband, David Foster Wallace, had hanged himself, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.

David Foster Wallace taught creative writing and English at Pomona College.

Wallace’s very first novel, “The Broom of the System,” gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition and offbeat humor.

Then in 1996, his most well known novel, “Infinite Jest” sky-rocketed Wallace’s reputation as a major American literary figure. The 1,000-plus-page novel was said to be complex and full of dark wit. In fact, Time Magazine named “Infinite Jest” in its issue of the “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.”

Wallace received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997. His short fiction was published in Esquire, GQ, Harper’s, The New Yorker and the Paris Review.

John Seery, a politics professor at Pomona College who used to work out with Wallace, said in a blog on the Huffington Post that the novelist had not been coming to the gym recently.

“I wrote him a note inquiring into his whereabouts. He wrote back and said my note cheered him. My head swirls right now. He expanded our senses of infinity and oblivion and more, much more,” Mr Seery wrote.

Wallace may have foreshadowed his own death in a 2005 speech to students at Kenyon College that spoke of the struggle with the mind.

“Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth,” he said.

“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Condolences to David Foster Wallace’s family and friends.

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Posted by: Monya

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