Read 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the 5th Anniversary of His Death

Let me start with the first lines that appeared in The New York Times five years ago: “David Fos­ter Wal­lace, whose prodi­gious­ly obser­vant, exu­ber­ant­ly plot­ted, gram­mat­i­cal­ly and ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly chal­leng­ing, philo­soph­i­cal­ly prob­ing and cul­tur­al­ly hyper-con­tem­po­rary nov­els, sto­ries and essays made him an heir to mod­ern vir­tu­osos like Thomas Pyn­chon and Don DeLil­lo, an exper­i­men­tal con­tem­po­rary of William T. Voll­mann, Mark Leyn­er and Nichol­son Bak­er and a clear influ­ence on younger tour-de-force styl­ists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Fri­day at his home in Clare­mont, Calif. He was 46.” It’s not your con­ven­tion­al obit­u­ary. No, it has a lit­er­ary style befit­ting the writer we lost on Sep­tem­ber 12, 2008. And five years after DFW’s death, we might want to pause and revis­it his many sto­ries and essays still avail­able on the web. To mark this mourn­ful occa­sion, we’ve updat­ed and expand­ed our list, 30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web, which fea­tures some time­ly and mem­o­rable pieces — “9/11: The View From the Mid­west,” “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” and Fed­er­er as Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence,” just to name just a few. Below we’ve also high­light­ed some of our favorite David Fos­ter Wal­lace posts pub­lished over the years. Hope you enjoy vis­it­ing or revis­it­ing this mate­r­i­al as much as I have.

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

David Fos­ter Wal­lace: The Big, Uncut Inter­view (2003)

Vis­it the David Fos­ter Wal­lace Audio Archive