Last spring, The Awl ran an excellent piece about David Foster Wallace’s “private self-help library” — just a small chunk of the three hundred-odd books from his personal library included in his recently-opened archives at the University of Texas at Austin’s Ransom Center. Now, The Awl reports that these titles — which, judging by the copious markings, Wallace read more than once — have inexplicably been removed from the collection. “It never occurred to me that Wallace’s estate would be in a position to rescind part of the sale of his documents to the Ransom Center; I wrote what I did under the assumption that these books would remain available to anyone who was interested in seeing them,” posts Maria Bustillos. “I was very sorry — or rather, entirely freaked out — to learn that that will no longer be the case.” Maybe there’s a good explanation for what happened, but we’re curious: what do you think DFW would make of this?
Comments (6)
Probably becasue A) They did not work and B) It is non of your fucking business!
Hear hear, Jeremy.
That is unusual for a literary estate. I imagine that they dealt with subject matter too close to living members of DFW’s family and his friends, and thus were taken out of the public collection and stored for the future.
I don’t get it. The Pale King was left in the middle of his desk with a light pointing at it before his suicide. If he was careful enough to make it known that he wanted that published I think he would have combed over his library to figure out what he didn’t want people to see. Then again, he committed suicide so there’s no way to tell.
I want them to be part of the archives but I understand that it probably proved sensitive to his surviving family. I don’t think that’s what he would have wanted, I just hope they weren’t “disappeared.”
maybe someone’s trying to polish his memory up…
considering the magnitude of his status as a writer, someone would think of it as something “embarassing” to know he was reading tons of selfhelp books
(i guess there is a pretty strong set of preconceptions toward this kind of para-literature)
if so, it’s sad indeed
[...] Is anyone else incredibly uncomfortable with knowing so much about David Foster Wallace’s inner life? You can read the notes he made in his personal collection of self-help books–which, in an odd (and, let’s face it, mortifying) turn of events, won’t be available to the public after all. [...]
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