David Foster Wallace was a postmodernist author who wrote, among other works, Infinite Jest. His writing is known for its maximalism, its difficulty, and its copious use of footnotes and end-notes.
Opinion
DFW is one of my all-time favorite writers. I first read Infinite Jest on the recommendation of a college professor, and it changed my conceptions about what writing could be. Although IJ and other of Wallace’s works are difficult or abstruse, that’s not what necessarily defines his work, contrary to how I’d argue that difficulty and abstruseness define, say, much of John Barth’s work. The complexity of Wallace’s writing rarely feels affected. It truly feels like this is the natural way through which he views and knows how to describe the world. Or that the difficulty is inherent in the world, perhaps. Regardless, it feels like any difficulty or complexity in his work is in service of an examination of very human phenomena like loneliness, love, addiction, class dynamics, etc.