It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? ... Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

A filmed adaptation of Brief Interviews directed by John Krasinski was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. When he experienced severe side effects from the medication Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant phenelzine. Wallace's mother Sally Foster Wallace attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and became a professor of English at Parkland College—a community college in Champaign—where David Foster Wallace won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996.

With his suicide he left behind an unfiniDavid Foster Wallaced novel The Pale King which was subsequently publiDavid Foster Wallaced in 2011 and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story was publiDavid Foster Wallaced in September 2012. David Foster Wallace (February 21 1962 – September 12 2008) was an award-winning American novelist short story writer essayist and professor at Pomona College in Claremont California.