Elizabeth Lopatto visits The Harry Ransom Centre's David Foster Wallace Archive and studies the drafts for DFW's Kenyon commencement speech in, Come On, Pilgrim:
A kind older librarian explains to me for what is the third time that day that she’ll be putting a box on a table, and I can have one folder at a time at my workspace. Due to the rush from South By, one of the folders I want is out. No one else seems to want the Kenyon College commencement address, so I settle in with it.
Wallace’s handwriting is small and neat, with distinctive capital “D”s generally written in one stroke that appears to begin at the bottom part of the straight line, go up, curve back around and release. He corrected a typewritten draft in red pen, green pen, and what appeared to be a blue marker.
A lot of the speech is tightened in this draft, with whole subclauses reduced to a word or two. Some paragraphs are cut entirely. One of the cut sections was an account of Wallace’s own commencement, some of which is overlaid in red ink with the word “stet”...Continue reading
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