A tale of infinite jest..

“Think for a second – what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets?”

David Foster Wallace, an author of seemingly unstoppable curiosity, imagination and ambition and the writer of critically acclaimed 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead at his home. The Claremont Police Department said Wallace's wife had called them Friday night, saying she returned home to find that her 46-year-old husband had hanged himself.

"He was the best of our generation, and his death is a loss beyond describing," Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award in 2006 for the novel "The Echo Maker," told The Associated Press on Sunday.

"I am so sad — stunned — it reminds us all of how fragile we are, and how close at hand the darkness is," said fellow author A.M. Homes, whose books include the novel "The End of Alice" and "The Mistress's Daughter," a memoir. "He was a wonderful writer, a generous friend, and a singular talent."

A native of Ithaca , N.Y. , Wallace was often compared to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo as an avatar of the Information Age, a visionary and eclectic as hip to ancient Greece and British poetry as he was to computers and television and popular culture. He also wrote often about addiction, depression and suicide, a post-1960s Dystopia in which "irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling."

Wallace's other works include short story collections "Girl With Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," and essay collections "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," and "Consider the Lobster."