Originally Aired in 1999; David Foster Wallace was a bedeviled wunderkind who had already written several books by the time he was 22. His best-known work was Infinite Jest, which takes on additional irony when one considers that Wallace committed suicide in 2008. During his lifetime he produced novels, essays, and short-stories, and taught at a number of colleges. A graduate of Amherst college summa cum laude with a double major in philosophy and English he received the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 1997, and in the same year was also awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by editors of the Paris Review. In our interview in response to my question about what is his favorite word, Wallace prophetically tells me that while he doesn’t know if it counts as a favorite word, the word he used most in his writing is “troubled.”
