Recently Dead

When Karen Green came home on Friday night, she discovered her husband, writer David Foster Wallace, had hanged himself. He was 46. LA Times book editor David Ulin said Wallace, often compared to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving, was "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," who "brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel...." His best-known work, 1996's Infinite Jest, is the sprawling 1,079-page, footnote-laden novel earned him a cultlike following. At the time of his death, Wallace was on leave from teaching creative writing at Pomona College outside Los Angeles. (LA Times; photos: top, Marion Ettlinger; inset, Getty)

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