I don't usually like to talk about the dead.

In a weekend that Amy Winehouse wasn't supposed to make it out alive, especially considering it's her birthday, we lost someone who actually contributed to the fabric of existence and you won't hear much about it.

Writer David Foster Wallace hung himself this weekend and your first questions is David Foster Wallace who?

This is why I don't usually like to talk about the dead. Anna Nicole Smith dies and the world (and legitimate news organizations) shuts down for days. When one of the this generation's great literary voices (with a Genius Grant no less) dies, the airwaves are silent by comparison. Talking about the dead is a vain attempt to justify a person's worth and rank their contributions to society. Eulogizing-via-blogging, like funerals, are tributary exercises meant only for the living.

I say "we lost" only because it's polite (like replacing passed for died or change for hope) and it implies some sort of ownership on "our part." His death for the world-at-large is nothing more than an opportunity cost, a loss of future revelations. Our loss pales by the big, gaping hole his loved ones are now stradling.

Sadly, like Tristan Egolf, it's Wallace's suicide, and not his body of work, that will cement him as a great, American writer: brilliant, but uncelebrated while alive with his self-deliverance escalating his myth. He'll get selected for Oprah's book club and everyone will say they "read him from day one" and say something literary and smart-ish and pretend to know what they are talking about. They'll spout learnings from Wikipedia as if they experienced Wallace's work in real-time water-coolering statements like "His E. Pluribus Unam (sic) correlation between television and modern fiction really did it for me and his John McCain coverage was nothing short of miraculous." I don't even know what that means, but I know I will overhear these things at a cocktail party in the coming week.

While not a household name, in fact David Foster Wallace has impacted many lives. Those that "get him" -- those that "get life" -- have been fans, not necessarily from day one, but like all great writers, whenever you are supposed to find them and their work in your life, you will. If you catch Bukowski too early, he's nothing more than a dirty old man and you have a pubescent window of two to three years to read "Catcher in the Rye" for it to be really meaningful.

"The Office" star John Krasinski is writing-directing the "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" movie so the uninitiated will have easy access to at least one of Wallace's works and when his catalogue is added to American lit classes, students will have some cinematical support to help them cram for exams and book reports. I'm assuming, of course, that there will be no Cliff's Notes for Wallace's works.

Wallace's writing forces you to pay attention, not only to the breadcrumbs he lays out as clues to follow the story, but also to your own thoughts and that's tough for most of us. We are not wired in these modern times to explore and uncover our own truths. We are not wired to think. If we were, Wallace would be bigger than Dan Brown or Chuck Klosterman and acts (read: acts) like Fall Out Boy and Jonas Brothers probably wouldn't exist, or at least we wouldn't have 24-hour coverage of their lives.

Wallace's books will start flying off shelves and sites as the curious start their post-mortem literary rubbernecking so pick up one now, so you, too, can say you've been reading him since day one.