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The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace

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How the author of <i>Infinite Jest </i>became the center of a self-help cult.

Jason Segel as DFW in The End of the Tour. Photo: Courtesy of A24 Films Nobody owns David Foster Wallace anymore. In the seven years since his suicide, he’s slipped out of the hands of those who knew him, and those who read him in his lifetime, and into the cultural maelstrom, which has flattened him. He has become a character, an icon, and in some circles a saint. A writer who courted contradiction and paradox, who could come on as a curmudgeon and a scold, who emerged from an avant-garde tradition and never retreated into conventional realism, he has been reduced to a wisdom-dispensing…

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