DFW Mystique

Over at Poets and Writers, Joe Woodward goes in search of David Foster Wallace, and finds that:

Everything I know about DFW (even his wanton use of acronyms in place of proper nouns) I know secondhand—through his books, a few printed interviews, reviews, and critical studies. It’s not that I haven’t tried to pose some questions directly to the writer himself, to ferret out a few insights from the man Sven Birkerts—in a review of Infinite Jest for the Atlantic Monthly in 1996—called “a wild-card savant.” No, my search to find the real DFW has been impeded by agent and publicist alike: I’ve been stonewalled. Whether he is “publicity shy,” as his publicist contends, or whether he’s weaving a web of literary mystique about himself, I do not know. And, it seems more and more likely, I never will.

You can read the full article here.