US Open? David Foster Wallace, Tennis and the Crisis of Meritocracy

Abstract:This essay posits a new framework for understanding the tennis writings of David Foster Wallace, starting from the premise that Wallace was a tennis player who became a writer rather than a writer who merely treated tennis as a theme. Reading Wallace's tennis essays alongside his canonical novel Infinite Jest (1996), I argue that his early experiences with the sport spurred a lifelong intellectual and literary meditation on how merit-based competition structures contemporary American society. The essay places Wallace's tennis writings in dialogue with recent scholarship in sports studies and with influential figures in the history of tennis, including Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King. It concludes with a reflection on how two contemporary examples of tennis writing, Andre Agassi's Open: An Autobiography and Claudia Rankine's essay on Serena Williams in Citizen: An American Lyric, extend Wallace's line of inquiry about sport and merit into the twenty-first century.