On David Foster Wallace's Birthday, Consider the Ransom Center

TL;DR

A four-paragraph KUT (Austin public radio) web item marking what would have been Wallace's 50th birthday (21 February 2012), pointing local listeners to the Ransom Center's Wallace archive. No interpretation, no theory — its archival value is the illustration and its caption: "Notes filling a copy of "Players" by Don DeLillo, one of Wallace's favorite authors." — the marginalia image this archive holds a copy of — plus one-line confirmations of the collection's contents as popularly understood in 2012.

Key claims

• The Ransom Center "acquired Wallace's archives in 2010"; viewing requires a reservation, but "much of it has been incorporated online."
• The archive is glossed as: the manuscript of the unfinished The Pale King, "books from his library filled with marginalia," and "a dictionary filled with words circled by the famously verbose author."
• The article's image: a marginalia-covered page of Don DeLillo's Players, captioned as from "one of Wallace's favorite authors" — image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

Themes

Archive publicity and local reception; the circled-dictionary and marginalia holdings as the collection's public face.

Cross-references

• wordnik-dfw-circled-dictionary-words — the circled dictionary this blurb gestures at.
• bostonglobe-fehrman-lost-libraries and rcmag-barnard-20-years-ij — the fuller accounts of the collection this piece advertises.
• The Players marginalia image is a visual companion to the record of DeLillo's influence on Wallace — the page of notes itself, not just a description of it.

Notable passages

• The caption: "Notes filling a copy of "Players" by Don DeLillo, one of Wallace's favorite authors."
• The dictionary gloss: "a dictionary filled with words circled by the famously verbose author."