David Foster Wallace's Unfinished Work

The March 9 edition of The New Yorker includes a story about the late author David Foster Wallace and an excerpt from his unfinished novel, "The Pale King."

One portion of the story describes how Wallace's wife, Karen Green, found him the day he took his own life:

Green returned home at nine-thirty, and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Little, Brown. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had not completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the ending he chose.

There is much more to the story. Find it at The New Yorker.

(via The Washington Post)

— TJ Sullivan in LA