Steven Moore (Full Stop interview)

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TL;DR

A 2014 Full Stop interview with the independent literary historian Steven Moore, almost entirely about his own work — the multi-volume The Novel: An Alternative History and his edition of Gaddis's letters. David Foster Wallace surfaces only in a single paragraph of personal recollection: Moore corresponded with Wallace for years, met him around the mid-1980s, and saw him again in Normal, Illinois, after Wallace took a teaching post there in 1993 (Moore was then working for Dalkey Archive Press, also based in Normal). The one anecdote is a tennis memory — Wallace, "a championship-level tennis player when younger", blowing Moore off the court once he was allowed to play full out. There is no Infinite Jest content of interpretive value; the interest is the Moore-Wallace acquaintance itself — the friendship behind Moore's separate comparison of the novel's first draft against the published book.

Key claims

Moore knew Wallace, and the acquaintance is old. Moore first met Wallace in the mid-1980s "(after corresponding with him for a few years)," describing him then as "very quiet and polite."
The Normal, Illinois / Dalkey Archive connection. "I saw him a few more times after he moved out to Normal, Illinois: by then I was working for Dalkey Archive Press, which was located there, and he took a teaching position there in 1993." (This dates and locates the friendship that underlies Moore's later archival/first-draft work on Wallace.)
The tennis anecdote. Wallace was "a championship-level tennis player when younger"; one hot summer they volleyed lazily until "At one point he politely asked if he could play full out, after which he blew me off the court. I could barely see his serves, much less get a racket on them."
No IJ content. The interview advances nothing about Infinite Jest's composition, drafts, structure, or meaning; Moore's substantive Wallace scholarship (the first-draft comparison) is not discussed here.

Themes

Literary friendship and the independent-scholar life; Wallace's tennis prowess (a biographical corroboration of the athlete-writer); the archival impulse (Moore as a preserver of writers' papers, context for his later Wallace work).

Cross-references

moore-first-draft-ij — Steven Moore's actual Infinite Jest contribution: his comparison of the first-draft typescript against the published novel (the W6/genetic-criticism source). This interview is the man behind that essay, not the essay itself.
memorial-rollingstone-lipsky-lost-years-last-days-2008 — the tennis-prodigy biography Moore's court anecdote corroborates, and the 1993 move to Illinois State at Normal.

Notable passages

On Wallace's tennis: he was "a championship-level tennis player when younger"; "At one point he politely asked if he could play full out, after which he blew me off the court. I could barely see his serves, much less get a racket on them."
On the friendship's setting: "I saw him a few more times after he moved out to Normal, Illinois".