As the literary world mourns the passing of David Foster Wallace, Playboy magazine has posted a fascinating exclusive–reprinting the first piece of fiction that Wallace ever published.
According to the site, the great postmodern novelist’s first work of fiction was published in Playboy. For about a half-century, that magazine has been one of the the country’s better venues for fiction. Most recently, the magazine serialized a hardboiled novel by Denis Johnson.
In addition to the story, Playboy published a blogged tribute to Wallace, a memory from contributing Editor Alice K. Turner, reminding us that Wallace, like everybody else, was once a struggling writer collecting rejections.
“He was then a grad student in the MFA program at the University of Arizona … He would send me stories, and I would reject them. His cover letters got funnier and funnier, and so did my rejection letters, and soon we were shooting wisecracks back and forth like Laurel and Hardy. And then, finally, I bought a story.”