The World According To DFW (Ransom Center archive announcement, with Bonnie Nadell's account)

source

TL;DR

A short blog post by novelist Alec Michod occasioned by the Harry Ransom Center's acquisition of David Foster Wallace's papers, whose lasting value is its long block quotation from Wallace's lifelong agent Bonnie Nadell on how the archive physically came to exist: Wallace "left his work in a dark, cold garage filled with spiders and in no order whatsoever", and Nadell and Wallace's widow boxed and labeled it into order themselves. Nadell's testimony inverts the "fast and clever and undisciplined" caricature of Wallace: however messy the storage, "the actual writing is painstakingly careful" — layered multi-color edit passes, obsessive word- and name-choosing, dictionary mining. The post also inventories the acquisition's headline items: a handwritten early draft of Infinite Jest, the annotated personal library, the circled-words dictionary, and the Pale King manuscript.

Key claims

The HRC "has been on a spending spree for years" (Agee, Mailer, DeLillo papers) and has now added Wallace's; highlights include "a handwritten early draft of Infinite Jest," books from his personal library with marginalia, "a dictionary with words Wallace circled" (linked by Michod to the usage essay published in Harper's, April 2001), and "The manuscript of the elusive Pale King is there, as well." Much of it is "available online."
Nadell on the garage (block quote): "Organizing David Wallace's papers for an archive was not a task I would wish on many people. Some writers leave their papers organized, boxed, and with careful markers, David left his work in a dark, cold garage filled with spiders and in no order whatsoever. His wife and I took plastic bins and cardboard boxes and desk drawers and created an order out of chaos, putting manuscripts for each book together and writing labels in magic markers."
Nadell on the writing itself: "as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye."
Against the caricature: some people felt David was "too much of a" "look ma no hands" kind of writer, "fast and clever and undisciplined"; Nadell counters that his notes-to-self are scrupulous: "How a character's name was gone over and over until it became the right one. How David looked through his dictionaries making notes, writing phrases of dialogue in his notebooks," and "his excitement in discovering a wild new word to use."

Theories & evidence

No THEORY blocks: the post is acquisition news plus agent testimony — biographical and compositional, with no interpretive claim scoped to a novel crux. Nadell's revision-practice account is registered as evidence yield for the composition record (below), not as a theory.

Themes

Composition and revision practice (the multi-pass, multi-ink editing; name-choosing; dictionary mining); the archive's own origin story (the garage, the improvised ordering); the author's posthumous reputation (the disciplined craftsman vs. the "look ma no hands" caricature).

Cross-references

riles-in-dfw-archive-part1 and smartset-reading-wallace-reading — firsthand visits to the collection this post announces; riles's "[d]ifferent pen colors, underlines, rearrangements" observation matches Nadell's "levels of edits marked in different colored ink" from the other side of the reading-room desk.
theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — the annotated personal library named here as a headline item.
The circled-words dictionary — the same artifact behind the dfwwords blog's circled-words material (see the DFW Words source notes) and Michod's Harper's-usage-essay connection.
dtmax-every-love-story — the biography's account of Nadell's role from 1985 on; her "represented David from the beginning of his writing career" line here is the agent's own voice.
krug-wapo-dfw-fateful-correspondent — companion press coverage of the papers' afterlife.

Accuracy notes

The post transposes the usage essay's title as "Present Tense: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage"; Wallace's essay (Harper's, April 2001) is titled "Tense Present."

Notable passages

Nadell: "David left his work in a dark, cold garage filled with spiders and in no order whatsoever."
Nadell: "His wife and I took plastic bins and cardboard boxes and desk drawers and created an order out of chaos, putting manuscripts for each book together and writing labels in magic markers."
Nadell: "as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful."
Nadell: "For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence".
Nadell, on the doubters: people who felt David was too much of a "look ma no hands" kind of writer, "fast and clever and undisciplined".
Nadell: "How a character's name was gone over and over until it became the right one."