Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All

First published as an article titled “Ticket to the Fair” in Harper’s Magazine in July 1994, and later collected and published in Wallace’s acclaimed 1997 essay collection book, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, this hilarious essay chronicles David Foster Wallace’s time visiting the Illinois State Fair. The essay explores Midwestern American culture, traditional fair spectacles (such as butter sculptures and livestock competitions), heavy-fried fair foods, and encounters with local exhibitors and attendees. 

Beneath the humor and seemingly mundane details, Wallace offers a thoughtful reflection on entertainment, community, consumerism, and the contradictions of American life. It’s an affectionate yet critical portrait of ordinary people and the peculiar ways we seek distraction, connection, and escape. Beloved for his keen eye, sharp wit, and relentless self-mockery, David Foster Wallace has been celebrated by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. 

• "The Best Mind of His Generation"
  New York Times
• "A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing...about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future...while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives."
  New York Times
• "One of the most influential writers of his generation."
  New York Times
• "A novelist with the industrial-strength intellectual chops to theorize even our resolutely anti-intellectual age....Wallace's ear for dialogue was unmatched in contemporary fiction."
  Time