DFW formerly meant Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and now means David Foster Wallace, the contemporary Young Werther whose posthumous career seems to be gathering steam in a fit of celebrity worship by the media cognoscenti. We're still Romantics enough to delight in a story of genius brought low, or artistic sensitivity extinguished by the crude, cruel world. Wallace obliged. He acquired in his short life everything that many of us lesser-known auteurs have worked for in vain in our longer ones: respect, guaranteed publication, good sales, a position in the literary pantheon. But he was unmade by the celebrity machine that made him, and yielded control to inner demons that we can never know of. Or was his suicide, apparently well planned, a final, great celebrity gesture, empty panache better suited to James Dean driving into the sunset and certain death at high speed? Or like Pushkin provoking a man known to be a better shot to a duel with pistols: death with make-believe honor? Another celebrity suicide, John Kennedy Toole (who became a celebrity as much because of his suicide as anything) killed himself out of despair at his failures as a writer; Wallace did so in despair at his successes. The thing is, I understand the former, and don't understand the latter. It seems like the ultimate self-indulgence. But I'll tell you one thing: DFW 's sales have never been better.