Quack This Way

David Foster Wallace was at the center of late-20th-century American literature, Bryan A. Garner at that of legal scholarship and lexicography. It was language that drew them together. The wide-ranging interview reproduced here memorializes 67 minutes of their second and final evening together, in February 2006. It was DFW's last long interview, and the only one devoted exclusively to language and writing.

It was an accidental friendship if ever there was one. David Foster Wallace was at the center of late-20thcentury American literature, Bryan A. Garner at that of legal scholarship and lexicography. It was language that drew them together, and it was DFW who reached out to BAG. It was DFW who penned “Authority and American Usage,” the encomium to Garner’s dictionary of American usage. The 95- page essay appeared first in Harper’s in abridged form and in its full-length version in Consider the Lobster. It was an auspicious beginning for their friendship.