Letter from David Foster Wallace to the critic Sven Birkerts (with Birkert's copy of DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again)
1993. A typed letter signed from Syracuse in June 1993. Birkerts has offered again the opportunity to join him on a panel, which was apparently a panel on on the state of contemporary fiction with Jonathan Franzen in Arlington, MA. “We are on,” Wallace writes,” but do me a favor: drop me a line in September sometime and remind me. I am inept at the little exigencies of travel and tickets, and I’ll forget or mess it up.” He finishes by offering his new address in Bloomington, IL–he’d been hired as a professor. The relationship between Wallace and Birkerts began in “1989 or 1990,” per Birkert’s recollection, when Birkert’s reviewed Wallace’s story collection Girl with Curious Hair for the now-defunct little magazine Wigwam. In a piece reflecting on Updike and Wallace, Birkerts remembers that Wallace “had written a thank-you letter (very Wallace, that) in which he said he was living nearby in Cambridge, studying philosophy at Harvard; he proposed coffee.” They had an ongoing if sporadic correspondence from then on, and Wallace confided in Birkerts about his ambitions for Infinite Jest. As DFW’s biographer D.T. Max describes in The New Yorker, he wrote to Brikerts that he was trying for “a kind of contemporary Jamesian melodrama, real edge-of-sentimentality stuff.” Birkerts eventually reviewed Infinite Jest for The Atlantic. He also recallspublishing Wallace’s story “The Soul is Not a Smithy” in his first issue as the editor of AGNI, Boston University’s lit mag. Wallace gave back to Birkerts in that way and wrote that “Birkerts is the most interesting and persuasive critic in the U.S. today.” Among other honors, Birkerts is the recipient of a Guggenheim, the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, and the PEN Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the best book of essays. A fine letter folded in thirds. With the original envelope. Paired with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Wallace’s first essay collection, with Birkerts’s ticks, marginal lines, and brackets through much of the book. A near fine copy in like jacket.. Fine. Item #1826
Price: $4,750.00 save 5% $4,512.50