Abstract
While often described as a significant part of David Foster Wallace’s contribution to American culture, his essays highlight some of the author’s principles and values when it comes to American fiction, entertainment and the general status quo of American society in the 1990s and 2000s. There are several essays where Wallace discusses literary works, from Franz Kafka and Zbigniew Herbert to John Updike and Cormac McCarthy, as well as essays based on the evolution of American fiction at the turn of the millennium. Based on a selected corpus of essays from three of his essay collections – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster and Both Flesh and Not – the purpose of the paper is to highlight and discuss the ways in which Wallace analyses and understands literature not just as a writer, but also as an essayist and reviewer.