Ideas and Trends - The Best Mind of His Generation - David Foster Wallace - NYTimes.com

Ideas and Trends - The Best Mind of His Generation - David Foster Wallace - NYTimes.com



All this shone through Mr. Wallace’s fiction. ... He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.