Inside cover of David Foster Wallace's annotated copy of Don DeLillo's Players. Harry Ransom Center.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE was working on a novel when he committed suicide in September 2008. Coinciding with its posthumous release as The Pale King, the University of Texas at Austin has opened its Archive of Writer David Foster
Wallace — a special collection of his notes, manuscripts, and personal effects. Made up of 34 document boxes and 8 oversize folders, the collection has received as much attention for what it reveals about Wallace as a reader as for the window it provides into his creative process as a writer.

The Archive has about 300 books from Wallace’s personal library, many of them substantially annotated. I decided to make a complete list for myself by searching the special collection via the University’s online card catalog… and I thought other people might also be curious about what was on his bookshelf.

So for the convenience of bookworms everywhere, I am sharing it in the table below.1 There’s a really interesting blend of material and topics here so, if you’ve been looking for some good book recommendations, you should be set for a while!

Title	Author / Editor
Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories	James H. Pickering
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Compact Interactive Edition	X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia
Thinking in Writing: Rhetorical Patterns and Critical Response	Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan
American Short Stories (7th Edition)	Eugene Current-Garcia, Bert Hitchcock
Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting	J. Hoberman And Jeffrey Shandler
Safety of Objects	A.M. Homes
Darconville's Cat	Alexander Theroux
Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice - A Critical Essay, Revised edition (Russian Research Centre Study)	Alfred G. Meyer
Teaching What We Do: Essays	Amherst College Faculty
The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity	Amir D. Aczel
The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness	Andrew Weil
What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers (3rd Edition)	Anne Bernays
Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality	Anthony De Mello
The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose	Arthur M. Eastman
The Symbolist Movement in Literature	Arthur Symons ; With An Introduction By Richard Ellmann
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry	B.S. Johnson
The Principles of Mathematics	Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy	Bertrand Russell
Recombinant do re mi: Frontiers of the rock era (Planet rock)	Billy Bergman And Richard Horn
Writing Past Dark : Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life	Bonnie Friedman
Trinity Fields	Bradford Morrow
MARIJUANA Facts, Figures and Information for the 1980's	Brent Q. Hafen, Kathryn J. Frandsen
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage	Bryan A. Garner
Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes	Bryan Bunch
Myths to Live By	Joseph Campbell ; Foreword By Johnson E. Fairchild
Desperate Characters: A Novel	Paula Fox ; With An Afterword By Irving Howe
Carrie	Stephen King
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Movie Tie-in Edition (rack) (Narnia)	C.S. Lewis ; Illustrated By Pauline Baynes
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea	Charles Seife
The Man Who Loved Children: A Novel	Christina Stead ; Introduction By Randall Jarrell
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations	Christopher Lasch
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir By the First Women to Play in the National Hockey League	Cleo Birdwell
Bodies Electric: A Novel	Colin Harrison
All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, Book 1)	Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West	Cormac McCarthy
Suttree	Cormac McCarthy
Anarcho-Hindu	Curtis White ; Photographs By Donald Stuefloten
The Puttermesser Papers: A Novel	Cynthia Ozick
A Tour of the Calculus	David Berlinski
Rise of Computer State	David Burnham ; Foreword By Walter Cronkite
Going Down: A Novel	David Markson
Springer's Progress: A Novel	David Markson
Angels: A Novel	Denis Johnson
The Name of the World: A Novel	Denis Johnson
Nightwood (New Edition)	Djuna Barnes ; [Introduction By T.S. Eliot]
The Body Artist: A Novel	Don DeLillo
Americana (Contemporary American fiction)	Don DeLillo
End Zone	Don DeLillo
Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)	Don DeLillo
Libra (Contemporary American Fiction)	Don DeLillo
Mao II: A Novel	Don DeLillo
Players	Don Delillo
Ratner's Star	Don DeLillo
Running Dog	Don DeLillo
White Noise: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)	Don DeLillo
The Psychology Of Everyday Things	Donald A. Norman
The Golden Notebook: A Novel (P.S.)	Doris Lessing
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (Vintage International)	Doris Lessing
Inside Out	Larry Crabb
The Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1998	Phillip Lopate
Introducing Don DeLillo	Frank Lentricchia
The Sixties: Art, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade	Gerald Howard
Critical Theory Since Plato	Hazard Adams
Classics of Modern Fiction	Irving Howe
The Cinema Book	Pam Cook
Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal	Peter Johnson
Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler	Thomas Frank And Matt Weiland
Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy	Wade Hall And Rick Wallach
Granta 19: More Dirt, The New American Fiction.	Bill Buford
Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (Torchbooks)	Edmund Husserl
The Triple Thinkers	Edmund Wilson
The Constitution of the United States of America Analysis and Interpretation; Annotations of Cases Decided By the Supreme Court of the United States to June 30, 1952	Edward S. Corwin
Borges: A Life	Edwin Williamson
The Sermon on the Mount: The Key to Success in Life and The Lord's prayer, an Interpretation	Emmet Fox
In Our Time	Ernest Hemingway
Shame & Guilt (Hindsfoot Foundation Series on Treatment and Recovery)	Ernest Kurtz
The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Journey to Wholeness	Ernest Kurtz And Katherine Ketcham
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Preface And Notes By Matthew J. Bruccoli
The Complete Stories	Flannery O'Connor
Amerika	Franz Kafka
Entry in an Unknown Hand	Franz Wright
Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists	Fred Alan Wolf
Instructor's manual for the Random House handbook, fourth edition	Frederick Crews, Ann Jessie Van Sant
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism	Fritjof Capra
Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic	Geoffrey Hunter
The Mill on the floss	George Eliot ; With An Afterword By Morton Berman
Life After Television (Revised)	George Gilder ; [Illustrations By Kurt Vargo]
Erotic Communications: Studies in Sex, Sin, and Censorship	George N. Gordon
Imposters	George V. Higgins
Woody Allen	Giannalberto Bendazzi
Journey into Madness	Gordon Thomas
Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession	Greil Marcus
Morte D'Author: An Autopsy (Arts and Their Philosophies)	H.L. Hix
When Bad Things Happen to Good People	Harold S. Kushner
Insect Biology: A Textbook of Entomology	Howard E. Evans
The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions	Huston Smith
The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Galaxy Books Series Gb P)	I.A. Richards
The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist	Dorothy Day
What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions (N+1 Research Branch Pamphlet)	Ilya Bernstein
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?	Immanuel Kant ; Lewis White Beck
The Ultimate Rip-Off : A Taxing Tale	Iris Weil Collett
Ethics : Inventing Right and Wrong	J. L. Mackie
War Fever	J.G. Ballard
Crash: A Novel	J.G. Ballard, With An Introduction By The Author
Disgrace: A Novel	J.M. Coetzee
In the Heart of the Country: A Novel	J.M. Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians	J.M. Coetzee
Money and the Meaning of Life	Jacob Needleman
The Fire Next Time	James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room	James Baldwin
The Last Good Kiss	James Crumley
The Big Nowhere	James Ellroy
The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)	James Hollis
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce
The Hunters: A Novel	James Salter
Moo	Jane Smiley
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft	Janet Burroway
Wolf: A False Memoir	Jim Harrison
Saving Daylight	Jim Harrison
Warlock	Jim Harrison
Play It As It Lays: A Novel	Joan Didion
Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice	John Barth
The End of the Road	John Barth
Bradshaw on the Family: A Revolutionary Way of Self Discovery	John Bradshaw
An Adult Child's Guide to What's 'Normal'	John C. Friel, Linda D. Friel
Rhetoric: A User's Guide	John D. Ramage
Keys to Mathematics	John E. Maxfield And Margaret W. Maxfield
On Moral Fiction	John Gardner
The World According to Garp: A Novel	John Irving
Crossing & Cruising: From the Golden Era of Ocean Liners to the Luxury Cruise Ships of Today	John Maxtone-Graham
Levels of the Game	John McPhee
Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing	John R. Trimble
Nobrow : The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture	John Seabrook
Notes on Blood Meridian (Southwestern Writers Collection)	John Sepich
Stories of Faith	John Shea
Marry Me: A Romance	John Updike
Of the Farm	John Updike
Poorhouse Fair	John Updike
Rabbit, Run	John Updike
Toward the End of Time	John Updike
Strong Motion: A Novel	Jonathan Franzen
The Hero with a Thousand Faces	Joseph Campbell
Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (Norton Critical Editions)	Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent; A Simple Tale	Joseph Conrad
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871	Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849	Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865	Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859	Joseph Frank
Something Happened	Joseph Heller
Georg Cantor	Joseph Warren Dauben
Nonverbal Communications: The Unspoken Dialogue	Judee K. Burgoon, David B. Buller
PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies	Ken Kalfus
Story First: The Writer As Insider	Kit Reed
Live from Earth	Lance Olsen
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why. True Stories of Miraculous Endurance And Sudden Death, Library Edition	Laurence Gonzales
What Is Art?	Leo N. Tolstoy ; Translated From The Russian Original By Alymer Maude ; With An Introduction By Vincent Tomas
Uses of Infinity	Leo Zippin
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property	Lewis Hyde
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society	Dave Grossman
Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction	Linda Schierse Leonard
About Schmidt	Louis Begley
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel	Louise Erdrich
The Road Less Traveled	M. Scott Peck
Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans	Malachi Martin
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking	Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference	Malcolm Gladwell
Introduction to Computer Data Processing	Margaret S. Wu
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present	Mark Costello And David Foster Wallace
Et Tu, Babe	Mark Leyner
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: A novel	Mark Leyner
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects	Martha Kolln
Success	Martin Amis
The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing	Martin Davis
The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems	Martin Gardner
Where Are the Children?	Mary Higgins Clark
Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form	Matthea Harvey
The U.S. Income Tax: What It Is, How It Got That Way, and Where We Go From Here	Michael J. Graetz
A Place Of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest (Bur Oak Book)	Michael Martone
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience	Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
After Math	Miriam Webster
Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West	Morris Berman
Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Vol. 1	Morris Kline
How to Write Poetry	Nancy Bogen
Infini et inconscient: Essai sur Georg Cantor (Collection "Psychanalyse") (French Edition)	Nathalie Charraud
The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play	Neil A. Fiore
Room Temperature	Nicholson Baker
Trinities	Nick Tosches
The Naked and the Dead	Norman Mailer
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism	Paul De Man
Desperate Characters: A Novel	Paula Fox ; Introduction By Jonathan Franzen
Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties	Peter Biskind
The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess	Peter Brooks
Bliss	Peter Carey
Elements of Acoustic Phonetics	Peter Ladefoged
Recovering from a broken heart: A companion guide for the journey from suffering to joyful awareness	Philip Golabuk
The Whitsun Weddings: Poems	Philip Larkin
High Windows	Philip Larkin
Three Case Histories	Philip Rieff
Anti-Story: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction	Philip Stevick
The American Short Story 1900-1945: A Critical History	Philip Stevick, editor
Generation of Vipers	Philip Wylie
Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy	Philippa Foot
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Pelican)	R.D. Laing
Paradoxes	R.M. Sainsbury
Poetry and the Age	Randall Jarrell
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories	Raymond Carver
Speedboat	Renata Adler
Essays in the theory of numbers, 1. Continuity of irrational numbers, 2. The nature and meaning of numbers	Richard Dedekind ; Authorized Translation By Wooster Woodruff Beman
Rock Springs	Richard Ford
Operation Wandering Soul	Richard Powers
Gain: A Novel	Richard Powers
Galatea 2.2: A Novel	Richard Powers
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer	Richard Rohr
Alienation	Richard Schacht ; With An Introductory Essay By Walter Kaufmann
Revolutionary Road	Richard Yates
The Diviners: A Novel	Rick Moody
Bear and His Daughter	Robert Stone
Dog Soldiers, A Novel	Robert Stone
A Flag for Sunrise	Robert Stone
Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton Science Library)	Rudy Rucker
Practically Painless English (2nd Edition)	Sally Foster Wallace
Bill W. and Dr. Bob	Samual Shem And Janet Surrey
Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder	Samuel Wilson Fussell
Seize the Day	Saul Bellow ; [Introduction By Alfred Kazin]
The Best American Short Stories 1990	Selected From U.S. And Canadian Magazines By Richard Ford With Shannon Ravenel ; With An Introduction By Richard Ford
Satan Says	Sharon Olds
Understanding the Infinite	Shaughan Lavine
Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS	Shelley L. Davis
Winesburg, Ohio	Sherwood Anderson ; Introduction By Malcolm Cowley
Three Case Histories	Sigmund Freud ; With An Introduction By The Editor, Philip Rieff.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit	Sloan Wilson
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism	Stanley Cavell
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage	Stanley Cavell
The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War	Stephen Crane
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything	Steven D. Levitt And Stephen J. Dubner
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man	Susan Faludi
Against Interpretation: And Other Essays	Susan Sontag
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash	Sylvia Nasar
Compassion and Self Hate: An Alternative to Despair	Theodore I. Rubin
Hannibal Rising, A Novel	Thomas Harris
Black Sunday	Thomas Harris
Hannibal	Thomas Harris
The Silence of the Lambs	Thomas Harris
Something to Be Desired	Thomas McGuane
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious	Timothy D. Wilson
Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia	Tom Bissell
The Black Brook	Tom Drury
In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel	Tom Leclair
The Bonfire of the Vanities	Tom Wolfe
The Bluest Eye	Toni Morrison
What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems	Tony Hoagland
Quirky Qwerty: The Story of the Keyboard @ Your Fingertips	Torbjörn Lundmark
Molloy	Translated From The French By Patrick Bowle
On Writer's Block	Victoria Nelson
The Moviegoer	Walker Percy
Animal Portraits	Walter Schels ; Preface By Dennis C. Turner
Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity	Willard And Marguerite Beecher
A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest	William Dowling And Robert Bell
Pattern Recognition	William Gibson
Habitations of the Word: Essays	William H. Gass
Omensetter's Luck; a Novel	William H. Gass
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories	William H. Gass With A Revised And Expanded Preface
West Federal Taxation 2008: Individual Income Taxes, Professional Version (West Federal Taxation Individual Income Taxes)	William H. Hoffman, Jr.
The Anatomy of Disgust	William Ian Miller
Ironweed: A novel	William Kennedy
The Reluctant Taxpayer	William L. Raby And Carl Riblet, Jr
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language	William Morris, Editor
Instructor's Manual to accompany Literature	X.J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy
The Lover	Marguerite Duras
Change Your Mind: A practical guide to Buddhist meditation	Paramananda
Ywain : The Knight of the Lion	Translated by Robert W. Ackerman, Frederick W. Locke, and Carleton W. Carroll.
Of Love and Other Demons	Gabriel García Márquez ; translation from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self	Alice Miller ; translated from the German by Ruth Ward.
Goethe's Faust: Six Essays	Goethe / translated by Barker Fairley.
Gargantua and Pantagruel	François Rabelais ; translated and with an introduction by J.M. Cohen
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	Translated, and with an introduction, by Burton Raffel ; afterword by Neil D. Isaacs
Laura's Skin	J.F. Federspiel ; translated from the German by Breon Mitchell.
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea	Yukio Mishima ; translated from the Japanese by John Nathan
Barbed Wire: A Political History	Olivier Razac ; translated from the French by Jonathan Kneight
The Idiot	Fyodor Dostoevsky ; a new rendition by Anna Brailovsky, based on the Constance Garnett translation ; introduction by Joseph Frank
The Idiot	Fyodor Dostoyevsky ; translated with an introduction by David Magarshack
The Immoralist	André Gide ; a new translation by Richard Howard
Critique of Pure Reason	Immanuel Kant ; translated by Norman Kemp Smith.
The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (Penguin Press Science)	Tor Nørretranders ; [translated by Jonathan Sydenham]
Philosophical Investigations, The English Text of the Third Edition	Ludwig Wittgenstein ; translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
Selected Poems	Bertolt Brecht ; translation and introduction by H.R. Hays.
Quo Vadis	Henryk Sienkiewicz ; in modern translation by W.S. Kuniczak.
Scarlet and Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century	Stendhal ; translated and with an introduction by Margaret R.B. Shaw.
Labyrinths	Borges, Jorge Luis / Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby ; Preface by André Maurois.
Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories	Franz Kafka ; edited by Nahum N. Glatzer ; with a new foreword by John Updike
I'm Not Stiller	Max Frisch ; translated from the German by Michael Bullock.
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession	Apostolos Doxiadis
All Fires the Fire & Other Stories	Julio Cortázar ; translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine
Three Trapped Tigers	G. Cabrera Infante ; translated by Donald Gardner, Suzanne Jill Levine
Pafko at the Wall: A Novella	Don DeLillo
The Following Story	Cees Nooteboom ; translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke.
The Insanity of Normality: Realism As Sickness : Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness	Arno Gruen ; translated from the German by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum
The Wild Numbers	Philibert Schogt
Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works	Flannery O'Connor
The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, and Selected Stories	Gogol ; translated with an introduction by Ronald Wilks
The Joke (Definitive Version)	Milan Kundera

1. I did my best to make the corresponding Amazon links point to the correct translation / edition of the work in question. [↩]