On Sept. 12, the writer David Foster Wallace, who was 46, died by hanging himself in his Claremont, Calif., home. A formidable intellect and a virtuosic craftsman whose following seemed cultlike despite being too large to really qualify (several of his books were best-sellers), Wallace had been a professor of creative writing at Pomona College since 2001. Although he is best known for his 1,096-page novel, “Infinite Jest,” it’s his nonfiction that, for me, has always been the most reliable source of awe and pleasure. So when the news came of his death, I absorbed my shock stretched out on the couch reading cover to cover a fairly well-known Wallace work that deserves to be extremely well-known: his chronicle of seven days on the campaign trail during John McCain’s 2000 presidential bid.
