The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume for letting us bring together their words on Wallace’s words and their words on Wallace. The intensity of their engagement with his life’s work, their appreciation and love for it, drove our desire to put together a book on his legacy as much as our own wish to say what we had to say. We would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of Michael Pietsch, without whose blessing we wouldn’t have wanted to move forward with the project. Joe Parsons is owed a huge thank you for his support, early and late, as are many others at Iowa—Jim McCoy, Charlotte Wright, Karen Copp, Allison Means, and everyone else who helped bring this book into the world. Sam would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Missouri and his department, and Lee extends his gratitude for the support and resources provided by the English Department and Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University, the English Department at Princeton University, and the ACLS New Faculty Fellows Program. We both want to thank our families and friends for their encouragement. The original MLA panelists and the wonderful audience at the panel contributed greatly to our thinking on Wallace, as did many others, both fans and scholars, in the wider world of Wallace appreciators. Most of all, we would like to have been able to thank Wallace himself for his work, about which we are, as Infinite Jest’s Don Gately says of himself, “probably mostly still clueless,” but for which we are, also like Gately, grateful, both for its beauty and complexity and also for the “whiff of what’s true and deep” it affords us. ...