On September 12, 2008, I was sitting with Colson Whitehead on a couch in a Brooklyn bar at an after-party for the Brooklyn Book Festival, when he leaned over to tell me that the author David Foster Wallace died.

I was devastated.

As the news spread through the room, I noticed an under-current of something resembling relief. The biggest talent of our generation, someone whose work seemed to tower over everyone else's, was suddenly off the board.

I remember the moment distinctly; how grotesque it felt, watching what I thought were people secretly reveling in the death of another writer. Until, moments later, I saw it differently.

It struck me as profoundly honest.

No one was celebrating a suicide. They weren’t reveling in his death. They were reacting to the impossible pressure of measuring themselves against someone who seemed incapable of writing a bad sentence. The relief was wasn’t about him; it was about them.

David Foster Wallace wasn't simply gifted; he was brilliant, prolific, and relentlessly inventive. His prose felt almost painfully alive, and Infinite Jest, a 1,079 page novel that permanently altered the landscape of contemporary American fiction, was only his sophomore effort.

The fact that he died by suicide haunted me. For months, I couldn't stop thinking about it. If someone that gifted, that admired, that seemingly indispensable could lose his battle with despair, what did that mean for the rest of us? What if it happened to me?

In the years that followed, another David Foster Wallace emerged.

His wife, the incredibly talented artist Karen Green, found his body. Stories surfaced about the ways he'd treated women, (specifically, the writer Mary Karr) revealing a man who could be cruel, manipulative, misogynistic and deeply flawed. More recently, as revelations about other celebrated male artists have accumulated, we've been forced to confront the same uncomfortable question again and again:

What do we do when the work is extraordinary but the person who made it isn't?

I've come to think they're two different conversations.

The art teaches us how to think, see, and make. The work deserves criticism on its own terms. The person deserves moral judgment on theirs. A novel can enlarge your life, while its author can still diminish other people's. One is aesthetic; the other is moral. The work deserves to be judged as art. The person deserves to be judged as a person.

We can appreciate a work of art and hold the person who made it accountable for their harms and failures as people. It’s hard, but it’s necessary, I think. If we want to learn. Bad people are capable of exquisite craft. Wallace’s grasp on literary craft was sui generous, and to study that won’t make you a bad person.

In other words, we don't have to excuse the person to learn from the work. We shouldn't, in fact, excuse the person. Confusing the two impoverishes both.

Which brings me to David Foster Wallace's 2003 course, SELECTED OBSCURE/ECLECTIC FICTIONS.

David Foster Wallace was an extraordinary reader of fiction and, by all accounts, a phenomenal teacher.

I wouldn't have wanted to date him. I probably wouldn't have wanted to be his friend. But I would have taken his class in a heartbeat.

So today I'm sharing the closest thing to taking it. It goes well beyond a syllabus, and includes the complete course packet: the reading list, assignments, grading philosophy, peer-review guidelines, student questionnaire, and the notes that framed the semester. If you've ever wondered what it would have been like to study literature with David Foster Wallace, this is probably the closest you'll ever get.