D.T. Max on the life of David Foster Wallace

New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max never formally met enigmatic novelist David Foster Wallace. But he became fascinated with his electric works (“Infinite Jest,” “The Broom of the System,” “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,”) and Wallace’s explorations of what it meant to be alive in the information-overload era. Wallace, tortured with depression and mental illness, committed suicide in 2008. Max wrote a magazine profile of him shortly th...