Yesterday, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas announced their acquisition of the David Foster Wallace archive. The archive was assembled by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and Bonnie Nadell, his long-time literary agent, from the mess of papers he had stashed in a dark garage overrun with spiders. Nadell wrote in a blog post: “I know there were people who felt David was too much of a ‘look ma no hands’ kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are.”

So what exactly is in the collection? We spoke with Molly Schwartzburg, the curator of British and American Literature at the Ransom Center. The bulk, she told us, is comprised of the manuscript materials for his novels, including multiple drafts of “Infinite Jest” and “Broom of the System,” a single draft of “Girl with Curious Hair,” and annotated drafts for nearly all of his non-fiction essays, including several notebooks for “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”

There are also some two hundred books from Wallace’s own library. “Virtually all of the books are annotated, many are heavily annotated,” Schwartzburg said, and noted that Wallace was especially fond of taking notes and compiling vocabulary lists on the inner cover. The collection, heavy on contemporary fiction, contains nearly all of Wallace’s friend Don DeLillo’s novels, including some pre-publication typescripts. Other titles include Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” and “The Tipping Point,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Strong Motion.” “Unfortunately,” Schwartzburg said, “there does not appear to be a copy of ‘The Corrections.’ ”

There is, however, a paperback copy of Mary Higgins Clark’s pulpy suspense novel “Where are the Children?” “I have no context for it, but it looked like he was doing a rhetorical analysis of how gender relationships were playing out over the course of the novel,” Schwartzburg told me. “He appeared to really engage with her and looked carefully at how she structured her narrative. Clearly, he read very widely.” There’s even a marked-up edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which Wallace circled words like “witenagemot.”

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

The archive also contains an extensive amount of writing from Wallace’s childhood and youth: a whimsical childhood poem about vikings, signed “David Foster Wallace”; school essays about “Pride and Prejudice” and “Moby Dick”; four issues of “Sabrina,” the Amherst humor magazine he co-founded with his roommate, Mark Costello. For an author who leapt with astonishing rapidity from youthful promise into adult virtuosity, the juvenilia may prove especially illuminating.

Of course, the archive, which will become available to the public this fall, is missing one crucial element: material related to his posthumous novel, “The Pale King.” Once the book is published—sometime next year, according to the latest reports—the Ransom Center will inherit this mountain of manuscripts. At this point, Wallace fans will be able to take cold comfort in the fact that his archive is finally complete.

For more on Wallace, see D. T. Max’s Life and Letters from 2009. And for more on the Ransom Center and why great writers’ work ends up there, see Max’s 2007 Letter from Austin.





1 / 10 Chevron Chevron “If you were to see a viking today, it’s best that you go some other way,” wrote a young but wise Wallace in “Viking Poem.” Note the early use of his signature as “David Foster Wallace” at the top of the page.

(All images courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)