Daniel T. Max

The author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery profiles the life of the influential and tormented literary figure, drawing on conversations with family and friends as well as hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and audio recordings to offer insight into his authentic writing style and his 2008 suicide.

A Life of David Foster Wallace

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

Amy Thibodeau

Solid book and a sensitive treatment of the life and death of DFW. Sometimes a bit of a slog to get through.

Mat Connor

lucinda ventimiglia

Marcus Rosen

D. T. Max

The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

Pedro Pinheiro 

Katie Day

Nick Chmura

Stephen Schenkenberg

In his lifetime, David Foster Wallace was lauded by critics and loved by fans. But even to those who had barely read his work, he was something of a cult figure. Since his suicide in 2008, Wallace has become the Kurt Cobain of the printed word, and his life and death now stand as symbols of a generation's hopes and their despair. In this compelling account of Wallace's evolution from anxious adolescent into post-modern anti-hero, D. T. Max speaks to those who knew him intimately and those who were drawn to him from afar to tell the story of a man struggling to write authentically about what it is to be a f***ing human being against the frenetic noise of modern life and the cavernous void of American culture. This is a story of drugs and depression, of madness, competitiveness, genius and creativity intertwined, of a man who felt profoundly lost but still found a way to capture this lostness in words and hold it defiantly aloft, like a flag for his generation.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story A Life of David Foster Wallace

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