But it is pretty hard to find actual copies of the letters of correspondence between DeLillo and Foster Wallace. This might be because of legal-copyright-stuff-reasons. For what I know the Ransom Center offers to make copies (putting their watermark on them) for money and just demand that whoever wants to publish some of the material make a kind of legal or heritage disclaimer that very clearly states where that material comes from, i.e. the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. So that shouldn't be the problem, if I'm right about this, which I'm of course not quite sure of. And the whole thing is much more non-comprehensive for me, because the letters of correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo are not even part of the newly opened DFW archive, but they are part of the DeLillo archive, which was acquired in 2004. So lots of people had lots of time to get their hands on them even before DFWs death in 2008 and, consequently, the acquisition of the Foster Wallace material a year later.
However, the letters range from the very first letter in 1992 to 2003. And that's not because they stopped writing each other, but of course because the DeLillo archive, acquired in - see above - 2004, stops in 2003. And just if you're wondering about this: Yes, Don DeLillo is still among the living.
Really the only digitalized letters I could find are those linked below, including the above mentioned very first letter DFW ever wrote to DeLillo.
So: if you are in possession of (il)legal digital (or hard) copies of any of those letters of correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo or if you live in Austin, Texas or elsewhere but would be willing to visit the Ransom Center or if you are an employee of or employer at the aforementioned Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas and are willing to make copies of those letters whether legally or illegally and are willing to send them to me via electronic means or quaint ones or if you happen to know anyone in possession of some of those letters and you are able to persuade him/her that it is necessary to make them available to me or otherwise just rob him/her w/r/t the letters/copies so please do by all means all that is necessary to achieve that goal because your moral and spiritual integrity is on the line, even if you feel that you do not know me and have no possible obligation w/r/t the person that constitutes myself, the fact that you chose not to do something about this situation will nag at your consciousness day in day out until finally, eventually, your self-centered self will turn into a self-devouring self and there will be tics and symptoms, physically and mentally, to go with the self-devouring that will make you wish you had done something about my longing, my desire and despair, earlier, in order to keep your normal happy life from turning itself into a permanent state of desperate desirical self-hatred and mourning for lost opportunities like this one to make your personal life and life in general a better place to dwell while time passes relentlessly until the very end and makes you want to wish you had - as mentioned above - given me and the world what I wanted, namely some possibility to lay my eyes and soul onto some of the letters of correspondence between the late David Foster Wallace and the still-among-the-living (as far as my knowledge goes) Don DeLillo and if you do claim you know not where they are, they are right there at the Harry Ransom Center of the UT in Austin, Texas, right there in the DeLillo archive, Series II. Correspondence, Subseries A. Alphabetical Files, Individual correspondents, Wallace, David Foster, with replies from DeLillo,1992-2003, n.d., Container 101.10 or box 101, folder 10.
The letters I tracked down so far
- In a pdf from kottke.org including the very first from Wallace, dated 11 June 1992 and one by DeLillo dated Feb 5, 1997: here
- Ellis from It's A Livre Life visited the Ransom Center in February 2011 and put these fragments up (on what would have been Wallace's 49th birthday, actually) and a little later a full letter by DFW dated 10-10-95
