The New York Times looks back on David Foster Wallace's work and themes.

Although his books can be uproariously, laugh-out-loud funny, a dark threnody of sadness and despair also runs through Mr. Wallace's work. He said in one interview that he set out with "Infinite Jest" "to do something sad," and that novel not only paints a blackly comic portrait of an America run amok, but also features a tormented hero, who is reeling from his discovery of his father's bloody suicide--his head found splattered inside a microwave oven. Other books too depict characters grappling with depression, free-floating anxiety and plain old unhappiness. One of the stories in "Oblivion" revolved around a cable TV startup called "the Suffering Channel," which presented "still and moving images of the most intense available moments of human anguish."