David Foster Wallace was found dead in his home last night from an apparent suicide by hanging. (See previous post).

For interviews and other links about the work of David Foster Wallace, who won a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1997 and published an impressive and critically acclaimed body of work, see Saturday’s post. Read yesterday’s New York Times article about Wallace here.

Recently, David Foster Wallace has been critical of John McCain, whom he once praised as “the great populist hope of American politics” in an 80-page essay commissioned by Rolling Stone.

The background: In 2000, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay entitled “Up, Simba,” about John McCain’s bid for the White House that was excerpted in Rolling Stone, published as an e-book, and is available in its entirety in Wallace’s 2005 essay collectionConsider the Lobster. Oddly enough, the essay was reissued as a book, McCain’s Promise, in June of this year, by Back Bay Books.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the essay “a patient and thoughtful meditation on what McCain’s military past-specifically, his five-plus years as a prisoner of war-means about his moral fiber.” The publisher’s description reads, in part, To get at “something riveting and unspinnable and true” about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man.

Here is a March 2008 blog post about the essay, containing the text of the final paragraph.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal prior to the book’s 2008 release, Wallace urged readers to consider the context:

“The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing.”

As for his earlier appraisal of McCain as “the great populist hope of American politics,” Wallace said in the WSJ interview: “The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it’s very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.”

Whether or not Wallace approved the publication of the essay in book form is unclear. Perhaps he did, but as any author can tell you, when a publisher buys your book, you often have little control over future editions of that book. It’s conceivable that, when Back Bay acquired the paperback rights to Consider the Lobster, there was a clause in the contract saying that any portion of the book could be republished at the discretion of Back Bay. What is clear from the WSJ interview is that it is unlikely that Wallace would have wanted his words to contribute in any way to the election of McCain in 2008. His death is a tragedy. After making such an indelible mark on American letters, it is sad that his final publication, while characterized by “a genuine disillusionment at the sham of the whole arrangement: the endless political posturing, the robotic news coverage” (La Times Book Review), also serves, in some way, to cast John McCain in the heroic light the Republican party has envisioned for him: as a maverick. Maybe he was eight years ago, but he hardly looks like one today.