Unpublished David Foster Wallace story donated to the Ransom Center

source

TL;DR

A short Ransom Center Magazine news item (May 2014) announcing Karen Green's donation of the original manuscript of "Shorn" — a little-known, unpublished two-page story "about a boy having his hair cut by his mother," written while Wallace was a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Pure archive news, but it puts on record a suggestive early mother-and-son miniature (accessible only in the HRC reading room) and a couple of useful collection facts: the archive opened in 2010, has been supplemented by agent and publisher papers, and had by 2014 supported "more than 14 research fellowships".

Key claims

The manuscript of "Shorn," a "two-page story, about a boy having his hair cut by his mother," written during Wallace's University of Arizona graduate years, was "donated by Karen Green," his widow and head of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.
The typed manuscript joins the drafts of Infinite Jest, The Pale King, the childhood writings, correspondence, teaching materials, and the annotated library; the Center acquired the archive in 2010 and has supplemented it since "with materials from Wallace's literary agent, his publisher, and others."
The Wallace papers are "among the Center's most frequently researched collections"; by 2014 the Center had "extended more than 14 research fellowships" for Wallace-related projects.
"The story is now accessible in the Ransom Center's reading room" — it remains unpublished; no text is quoted in the piece.

Themes

Archive acquisition and access; juvenilia/apprentice work; the mother-and-son subject in miniature (an Arizona-era preoccupation that precedes the Avril/Hal material — noted as biography-adjacent resonance, not argued as influence).

Cross-references

rcmag-barnard-20-years-ij — same author, the composition-record companion piece; together they sketch the collection's scope.
newsweek-walls-mixed-up-files and bostonglobe-fehrman-lost-libraries — the 2010 opening and formation of the archive this donation supplements.
The mother-cutting-a-boy's-hair subject sits upstream of the novel's mother-son preoccupations (the Avril/Hal material); with the story unpublished and unquoted, no textual claim is possible — a curiosity on the record, nothing more.

Notable passages

Not applicable — a four-paragraph news item; no manuscript text is quoted in the source. Representative line: the story is "about a boy having his hair cut by his mother".