Enfield Academy Tee

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In an apartment near the Syracuse University campus, David Foster Wallace divided his time between writing a 1,088-page satire on modern-day Americana and being the life of the party in the early 1990s. The book, "Infinite Jest," would help mark him as a notable contemporary American author. TIME made the book one of its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Wallace himself received the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant." But, people who knew Wallace during his three-year stint living in the apartment on Kensington Road, across from the Syracuse Real Food Co-Op, knew him more for his smarts and generosity than his troubles with depression and efforts to write the book that would make him famous.

Wallace began seriously writing Infinite Jest in 1991. The publication of the book took years of hard work not only from Wallace but from his agent Bonnie Nadell, his editor Michael Pietsch, and others who read and supported the book’s development in one way or another. Evidence of this hard work can be found throughout David Foster Wallace’s archive and in other related collections at the Harry Ransom Center.



The main settings of the novel are a tennis academy – Enfield Tennis Academy – and a halfway house for recovering addicts called the Ennet House Drug And Alcohol Recovery House (“redundancy sic”), which is next door to it. The chief counsellor at the halfway house, and one of the novel’s main protagonists, is Don Gately. Gately is a very big man: “the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on”. (Gately was based on a man Wallace met in recovery called Big Craig, who also did the elevator-door thing.)  The tennis academy setting is no accident -- Wallace was very good at tennis, boasting in later life that he had been “near great”. His game peaked early in high school, however, and his habit of overthinking every shot slowed him down. In his senior year he was ranked 11th in the Middle Illinois Tennis Association. The last tournament he won was the 18-and-under doubles at the Central Illinois Open in 1980.

While working on the novel, Wallace shared his early drafts with his editor, Michael Pietsch. Pietsch read and reread the manuscripts diligently, offering astute advice that helped tighten and clarify the narrative. Pietsch was encouraging but also practical. In a letter he wrote to Wallace on June 10, 1993, he voiced concern about the book’s length: “This should not be a $30 novel so thick readers feel they have to clear their calendars for a month before they can buy it.” Yet it’s apparent that Pietsch found the novel deeply moving and compelling. In a later letter to Wallace, the editor noted, “publishing this novel has probably been the most satisfying and exciting work I’ve ever gotten to do.”



Wallace also shared an early draft of the book with Don DeLillo, an author he admired greatly. A common friend told Wallace that the lengthy manuscript made an explosive sound when it landed on DeLillo’s front stoop. The two writers corresponded regularly during this period, and Wallace’s letters frankly reveal many of his struggles and concerns about the novel. In a letter dated October 10, 1995, Wallace wrote, “I think IJ is less self-indulgent and show-offy than anything I’d done before it… I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less Fun than it was. I have a lot of dread and terror and inadequacy-shit, now, when I’m trying to write.”

As the book came closer to publication, Wallace struggled with anxieties about how it would be received. The book was heavily promoted and highly anticipated, and although the hype must have been exciting and gratifying for Wallace, it was also deeply unsettling. When the book was touted by Little, Brown as a masterpiece before it was even published, Wallace wrote to Pietsch, “‘Masterpiece’? I’m 33 years old; I don’t have a ‘masterpiece.’ ‘The literary event of ‘96’? What if it isn’t? What if nobody buys it? I’m getting ready, inside, for that possibility; but are you guys?”

“In a time of unprecedented comfort and pleasure and ease, there was a real sort of sadness about the country,” Wallace is quoted saying. “I wanted to do something about it, about America and what our children might think of us."