David Foster Wallace, 46, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, Calif., according to the Claremont Police Department.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.
Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as “Girl with Curious Hair” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” In 1997, he received a MacArthur “genius” grant.
Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Wallace was teaching writing at Pomona College. Los Angeles Times
George Putnam, 94, the flamboyant broadcasting pioneer whose bombastic style and arch-conservative political views made him one of the nation’s highest-paid TV news anchors and one of its most widely lampooned, died Friday of heart failure.
Putnam, one of the inspirations for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s” Ted Baxter character, died at a hospital near his ranch in Chino, Calif., said Chuck Wilder, longtime producer of his syndicated radio program, “George Putnam’s Talk Back.”
Although he had been absent from television for decades, Putnam continued to do his radio show, a mix of opinion, interviews and phone calls, until just a few months ago.
It was the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, though, that were really Putnam’s broadcasting heyday. During those years he was a top-rated — and often controversial — news anchor for such Los Angeles stations as KTTV, KCOP, KTLA and KHJ (now KCAL).
His salary in the early 1960s, $300,000 a year, was said to be the highest of any TV newscaster in the country at the time, and his in-your-face editorials came to be widely lampooned.
For years, he delivered the news in a wall-rattling baritone voice while seated in front of a large American flag. In later years, he ditched the flag but added a segment at the end of the show he called “Talk Back,” in which he would argue with everyone from Nazis to anti-war activists. The Associated Press
