Introducing David Foster Wallace - A Master of Creative Writing

And while he was bursting with creativity, David Foster Wallace fought against depression. Media-shy, he rarely appeared on TV or gave interviews. During the last year of his life, he didn't even want to leave his house, afraid that some of his students (he was a part-time professor) might see him in his horrible state. One time at the end of a semester, when he sat with his students, he started crying over the fact that he would never see them again.

Published when Wallace was only 25, The Broom of the System lacks the maturity and uniqueness that his later prose has. Initially written as a thesis for one of his college classes, the novel received a positive review from the New York Times' well known critic Michiko Kakutani and earned the writer $20,000 in book royalties. This sudden success led young Wallace to Harvard University, where he acquired his master's degree.

The Broom of the System is a classic postmodern piece - its story is comical and pompous, the characters range from a talking parrot to a big-shot who wants to become super-fat so that he can conquer the whole world with his body. And at the same time, one person, a young, recent college graduate, tries to find some sense in all of that. 

Girl With Curious Hair collects the short stories that Wallace wrote as a creative writing student. The first signs of his recognizable style and obsession with popular entertainment are visible in the book.

Girl With Curious Hair received far less attention than The Broom of The System. Later, in an interview, David Foster Wallace mentioned that the book was so unpopular that during one of his readings only 12 people showed up.

However, nowadays this collection serves as an evidence of a young writer discovering what he is really interested in writing about.

Many of the stories evolve around famous people (David Letterman, Lyndon Johnson) and were published in magazines like Playboy and Esquire.

And what is the book about? Well... hard to tell. But in the center of it are a young tennis genius and a recovering drug addict. Somehow, their stories interconnect while at the same time, a video tape with some strange content is in circulation. Whoever plays it ends up dying because the tape is so entertaining that nobody can stop watching it. 

The book made David Foster Wallace world famous. Suddenly, he was considered one of the most important young American writers. He received a MarArthur fellowship (a $500,000 check whose purpose is to allow the recipient to concentrate on creating, instead of worrying about money).

Infinite Jest is a must read for every creative writing student. Wallace's ability to tell a story in thousand different ways will serve as an endless source of inspiration for young writers. 

David Foster Wallace's popularity continued to rise with this collection of essays. Many of them appeared in much shorter form in magazines like Premiere, Esquire and Harper's.

The topics range from highly academic discussions of popular culture, to memoirs about growing in windy Illinois and journalistic reports about David Lynch. The essay the book is most known for, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," describes, in a dairy-style, all the ridiculous things that David Foster Wallace experienced during a cruise. 

Amazingly funny and smart, this book will turn out to be the highest point of Wallace's career. This was his last work that received completely positive reviews. 

Although even after A Supposedly Fun Thing... Wallace's books continued to appear on various bestseller lists, there were fewer and fewer critics who still admired his work.

The only Wallace's work that got a screen adaptation, this half novel/half a collection of short stories contains various "interviews" with troubled men (and women) - sex addicts, psychopaths, misogynistic, rape victims, etc. 

The fictitious interviews are presented as some kind of self-examination. Instead of questions, all that the readers see is "Q", and the answer that follows. 

This was the first book written by Wallace that Michiko Kakutani didn't give a positive review for. She felt that Wallace's characters had become shallow and that his writing style had lost much of its unique style.

And although some parts seem more like unedited scrabbles from Wallace's notebook than like completed short stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is an entertaining page-turner. 

After Brief Interviews, fans of David Foster Wallace had to wait five years for his next book. And when it was finally published, they were in for a big shock - something had seriously changed in him. 

Suddenly, his stories were not bursting with humor and adrenaline. The plots became much slower,  ambiguous and realistic. Popular entertainment and celebrities did not seem to interest Wallace any more. 

His focus shifted to ordinary persons and ordinary troubles that they had to face. However, the "ordinary" issues that he wrote about are those that had not been explored before in fiction - boredom, monotony, work routines... 

David Foster Wallace became obsessed with boredom. The characters that started interesting him were those who spent their lives going to work every day, from 9-5, sitting

One of all-time best collection of essays, this humorous books challenges the readers' views on variety of topics, from adult videos to eating lobsters. 

In "The View from Mrs. Thompsons," Wallace describes the mood in a small American town on September 11th, 2001. 

In "Big Red Son," the author attends "Oscars" equivalent for the adult film industry, and examines the America's (and worlds) obsession with adult entertainment.

And in "Consider the Lobster," which appeared in Robert Atwan's Best American Essays series, Wallace asks a simply questions: is it morally right to cook an alive lobster in order to prepare a delicious meal?

For those who haven't read Wallace, this collection would be the best starting point. 

It's sad to see how shamelessly hungry book publishers are for money. Just several months after David Foster Wallace committed a suicide, Little, Brown and Company announced that they would release a book containing Wallace's commencement speech.

The whole speech you can hear on YouTube. It is 20 minutes long.

The book has 144 pages. And no, there's no extra material.

Just the commencement speech.

The editor at Little, Brown and Company thought of a terrific idea to spread the speech in such a way that each page contains only one sentence.

Throughout his career, every book that Wallace published had at least three hundred pages. He would never publish a book until he was sure that he had enough quality content. Even in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a book that seems somehow all over the place, Wallace left out some of the stories that at that moment did not seem good enough for him. 

This posthumously published unfinished novel serve as a reminder of how much the world has lost with David Foster Wallace's departure. 

The Pale King is about a group of young IRS workers whose lives turn into endless days of mind-numbing jobs where they do nothing else but cross-exam tax returns. It is a story of a whole generation of people whose dreams of a fulfilling life are lost somewhere in piles of paperwork that they need to work on - day in, day out.

Wallace is at his best in this novel. His writing is superb - sentences are beautifully crafted, language is rich and powerful, and each chapter can work as a separate short story.

Several excerpts from The Pale King appeared in New Yorker. The best part of the book is the chapter about a ghost who visits one of the examiners and talks to him about the usage of the word "boredom."