Attention DFW fanboys and girls! We were recently alerted by our friends over at HTML Giant that David Foster Wallace’s archive has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin. They’ll house a plethora of DFW-related goodies: original manuscripts for Wallace’s books and stories, his research materials and college and graduate school writings, as well as his first ever known signature — at the end of “Viking Poem,” penned when he was only six or seven.
The archive will also maintain Wallace’s dictionary and library of over 40 authors, all of their works heavily marked up by the king of annotation himself. Add this to the David Foster Wallace Audio Project and you’ve got at least a month’s worth of heavy intellectual stimulation to go on. Don’t jump in your jalopy for a literary-themed road trip yet, however — the materials won’t be available to researchers until the fall, though a “selection” will be on view in the Ransom Center lobby until April 9.
After the jump, check out the first handwritten page of Wallace’s draft of Infinite Jest, a few of the annotated insides of the books in Wallace’s personal library (DeLillo, McCarthy), as well as a sampling of the words he circled in his dictionary, to be dissected and pontificated upon at your leisure.
