David Foster Wallace profile

Wallace, who had been using an antidepressant called Nardil for many years, went off the drug in the summer of 2007 because he thought it was interfering with his writing. "He entered this new period of life with what [his friend Jonathan] Franzen calls 'a sense of optimism and a sense of terrible fear.' He hoped to be a different person and a different writer. 'That's what created the tension,' Franzen recalls. 'And he didn't make it.'" Read more in the current issue of The New Yorker.