fwriction

newsweek takes a tour through the late David Foster Wallace’s just-released archives. Read the story; see the photos:

On Feb. 7, 1972, when David Foster Wallace was 9 years old, he began work on a creative-writing assignment—a one-page story narrated by a tea kettle. “Hi I am a kettle,” his protagonist says, by way of introduction, adding: “Ouch! Listen I come to you for advice. This flame is real hot but I love my job.” Never mind the lack of commas throughout—the sort of flub Wallace’s later, grammar-obsessed characters might have fussed over. The earnest voice of this anthropomorphized appliance, which heats up water for the cruel Oomp family, quickly seems familiar. As it informs us of abuses suffered at the hands of the Oomps—who “kick me, scratch me, throw me … Mrs. Oomp even uses me for [the family] to throw up in. But I can’t leave them”—we can already recognize a Wallace archetype.