This week on Page-Turner, D. T. Max is writing about documents and artifacts he drew on in writing “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” his recently published biography of David Foster Wallace.

Whenever I think about literary juvenilia I think of a line from Steven Millhauser’s masterful faux-biography of a child novelist, “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright”: “Third grade surprised me: I had not anticipated desks.” All the same there is something about the aura of mystery and discomfort enfolding the adult David Foster Wallace that makes you want to search even his childhood writing for clues. You are looking both for evidence of his later mental travails but even more for the seeds of the spiny, sideways muscularity of his mature prose style. Such a distinctive style—really a way of seeing the world—can’t come out of nowhere, can it?

The Ransom Center at the University of Texas houses in its neat archival boxes whatever David’s parents saved of his early efforts, including various grade-school papers, what passes among little boys for memoir (“Dark, semi long hair dark brown eyes…. Likes underwater swimming football, T.V. reading. Height 55 inches weight 69 pounds”) and a few fake ad jingles he wrote, in all probability, when I was writing similar things in grade school, during that endless wait for puberty.

That’s not a ton of stuff, but the two likely earliest efforts are the more interesting: two poems, both of which, I’m guessing, spent at least a little time pinned to the Wallace family’s refrigerator. They are eye-catching, awkward, and certainly seem to suggest the atmosphere Wallace grew up in on a one-block street near the big public university in Champaign-Urbana. It was there that his mother, a grammar expert, used to invent words when there wasn’t a satisfying one already extent: “greebles,” for instance, meant the bits of lint and sock dust you brought into bed with you.

David’s mother held sway in that hot house, that much is evident. The locutions that burst forth in both poems make you imagine Sally Wallace racing around their neat two-story house, two precocious and demanding small children underfoot and the kettle whistling. The first, a poem about bread baking, goes:

My mother works so hard

And for bread she needs some lard.

She bakes the bread. And makes the bed.

And when she’s threw

She feels she’s dayd.

The second begins with noticeable élan:

“Vikings oh! They were so strong

Though there warriors won’t live so long.

And continues:

For a long time they rode the stormy seas.

Whether there was a great big storm or a little breeze.

There ships were made of real strong wood

As every good ship really should.

If you were to see a Viking today

It’s best you go some other way.

Because they’d kill you very well

And all your gold they’ll certainly sell

For all these reasons stay away.

There are moments in these poems that herald (or just accidentally foreshadow?) the mature David’s American plainsong voice, particularly the “real” and “really” of the second couplet in the Viking poem, but the voice one most strongly hears is again that of his mother. Not just the “dayd” in the bread poem—Sally, with a huff, throwing herself down on the couch, hands still dusty with flour and hours until her philosopher husband gets home—but what seven, eight, or nine-year-old employs the subjunctive: “It’s best you go some other way”? Only the son of a grammarian.

The poems present some dating problems. The bread-baking poem would seem to be earlier, with its wildly inconsistent handwriting. You feel Wallace, a bit of a troublemaker at school, is deliberately not staying between the lines. And what’s with that odd “David” dribbling down the page? Mr. Wallace, eyes on me!

On the other hand, the content of the bread poem seems more sophisticated than the Viking one, despite the latter’s more careful pencil-manship and general all-around sense of having met the wonder that is children’s reference books. That one also contains, as far as I found, the first attempt by David to include his mother’s unmarried name when signing his own. Wallace would later insist that this addition had been foisted on him by his agent, who, having earlier worked at Sierra Books, was aware of a nature writer named David Rains Wallace. “I would have called myself Seymour Butts if he’d told me to,” Wallace recalled with more wishfulness than truth in a note to Don DeLillo, in 2001. The bread poem, though, touches on another person’s emotions; it contains evidence of what psychologists call theory of mind: knowledge—this would not ultimately get much easier for David—that other people have feelings, too.