David Foster Wallace: The ‘Fresh Air’ Interview
In 2008, at the age of 46, he hanged himself. Looking back on his work, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani described Wallace as having used his prodigious gifts as a writer, his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness, to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America, overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification.