David Foster Wallace did the incredible: he brought dramatically new dimensions to the art of fiction writing. I have been looking forward to a life in which, every so often, a new work by DFW would appear, and I could spend a few hours escaping into infinite entertainment. He wasn't for everybody, but he was for me. I am sad.

Chicago Tribune, By Mark Caro, September 15

After David Foster Wallace became a twentysomething literary phenom—after the publication of his first novel ("The Broom of the System," 1987) and short-story collection ("Girl With Curious Hair," 1989) got the Thomas Pynchon comparisons flowing—he checked himself into a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch.

"In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier," he told me in 1996 upon the publication of "Infinite Jest," the 1,000-plus-page novel that would cement his status as one the few modern-day literary giants.

At the time, Wallace, who grew up in Urbana, was teaching English literature and creative writing at Illinois State University in Normal, and he strove to maintain a sense of normality even as reviewers such as New York magazine's Walter Kirn were raving about "Infinite Jest": "It's as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on 'Jeopardy!' The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good."

By many accounts, he succeeded; his former students and colleagues remember him as a deeply caring person whose casual persona as the bandanna-wearing "Dave" was far removed from his lofty literary reputation.