Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

[Small Town Guy]

Not sure if this is necessarily something that should go on the journalism board, but it should go somewhere.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library

A wonderful piece by Maria Bustillos on Wallace's private papers at the University of Texas.

There are college paper and letters when he was in fourth-grade. There's also this test he gave his own students:

WIN A LUNCH WITH DAVE, SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST, WELL-MANNERED EATER, BY SIMPLY IDENTIFYING WHAT ALL THE FOLLOWING WORDS HAVE IN COMMON:

Foreign
Big
Diminutive
Incomprehensible
Untyped
Pulchritude
S-less
Unwritten
Indefinable
Misspelled
Vulgar
High-class
Invisible
Unvowelled
Obscene

My only stab at a guess is that these are words that can be used to describe writing itself, though I feel like "pulchritude" is kind of wrong, that way. I would love to hear other ideas.

But she concentrates on his book collection, which numbers more than 300. In particular, she writes about the self-help books he had and the notes he made in them, looking for some insight into the mind that produced works of genius but also eventually destroyed him.