Christian Lorentzen · God wielded the buzzer: The Sorrows of DFW

David Foster Wallace’s parents were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands...

David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental. Jim was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois; Sally taught English at a community college, and at home with her children was what her son in his fiction would term a ‘militant grammarian’, constantly monitoring their usage and syntax, turning it into a game. David was a creature of…

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• Karen Colmán Martínez

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