A too-short life, examined
In the extraordinary life of David Foster Wallace, his time at Harvard was, fittingly, a footnote. Wallace — the author, most famously, of “Infinite Jest,” a novel so full-to-overflowing with ideas it required almost 100 pages of endnotes — came to Harvard in 1989, at the age of 27, intending to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy. He lasted half a semester before turning himself over to University Health Services, whose doctors promptly sent him to McLean Hospital for inpatient treatment of depression and alcoholism. Monday at Emerson Hall, the very building where a stressed-out Wallace was once found asleep under his desk in the philosophy graduate students’ office, D.T. Max ’84 discussed the research behind his new study of the writer, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.” Max’s biography — the first of Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at 46 — is “a remarkable book that puts a vast supply of...