David Foster Wallace
I’m reading through A Supposedly Fun Blog and ran across this passage:
…all of this, the aggrieved and distrustful critical reaction to any novel that comes within a quarter mile of what we might call the postmodern, has been established for years. It was well established, I mean to say, when David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest. Which means that he, like all authors today, wrote in the knowledge that the literary world would be filled with exactly those kinds of readers and critics who would dismiss his work out of hand for its artiness and pretension. And yet Foster Wallace wrote on, like a lot of writers do, in the stubborn belief in the good faith of his audience.
(which is actually a blockquote from here)
And it really speaks to what I love about DFW, because it’s not like he was without fear of being judged. It seems clear from his writing that he was actually extraordinarily, excruciatingly self-conscious about it all, but he did trek on.