David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself, at the age of forty-six, on September 12, was, in the words of the TLS reviewer Lawrence Norfolk, “the most significant writer of his generation”. His reputation was established by his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), 1,079 pages long (including nearly one hundred pages of eccentric endnotes), portraying a millennial America in the grip of its various addictions. Postmodern and demanding, the book is also heartbreaking and hilarious.

A stellar graduate in both English and philosophy, Wallace was also a ranked junior tennis player. All his interests are discernible in his fiction, alongside a formidable grasp of popular and commercial culture. In 1997 he received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

In his later short fiction and essays, he perfected a style in which post-modernism’s glib, ironic playfulness was used against itself, to find a way back to an unironic sincerity, all the more effective for being so hard-won. His open-minded account of John McCain’s 2000 Campaign was republished earlier this year as McCain’s Promise.

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