David Foster Wallace is from east-central Illinois, and this is a large part of his appeal. In addition, he has written a number of books. Among them are the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. There is also A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a collection of journalism and essays. It’s fair to say that Wallace has shown himself to be capable of tackling any subject or genre he chooses; his versatility and his attention to detail—of the physical world and also the nuances of feeling and consciousness—have made him one of the most influential writers the United States has produced in the last twenty years. After spending many years living in Bloomington, Illinois, and teaching at Illinois State University—the sometime rival of but not the same as the University of Illinois—Wallace accepted in 2001 a position as Roy E. Disney Professor of English at Pomona College, in southern California. October marks the release of Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞. Below is an email exchange with Wallace, though it wasn’t quite that. Questions were emailed to Wallace, who then took them home, answered them on his home computer—which is not connected to the Internet—printed those answers, and put them in the mail. As you can see, the interview could have and maybe should have gone on much longer. Wallace and his interviewer were traveling a lot in the weeks before this issue went to press, so we did our best. I guess it is six thousand words or so. That’s a good length.

—Dave Eggers

THE BELIEVER: I guess it would be fitting enough to start by asking what prompted you to write this book, Everything and More. Was it your idea, or were you asked by the [W. W. Norton] Great Discoveries series to address the subject? And if you can answer this, you’d mentioned on the phone that you wrote Everything and More “two books ago,” implying that there are two more finished Dave Wallace books in your desk drawer. Can you talk about those?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: I’ll give you the short version. This is basically the same publishing outfit that had done Penguin Lives, and they were doing a new series where non-tech people wrote about seminal stuff in math and science, and they tracked me down in Texas (long story) and pitched me in I think the summer of 2000. I’d had a certain amount of philosophy of math in school, and had kept reading (unsystematically)...