of Wallace's earliest work, including his first published essay, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young". Some writers have found parts of Wallace's nonfiction implausible. Franzen has said that he believes Wallace made up dialogue and incidents: "those things didn't actually happen". John Cook has remarked that "Wallace encounters pitch-perfect characters who speak comedically crystalline lines and place him in hilariously absurd situations...I used both stories [in teaching journalism] as examples of the inescapable temptation to shave, embellish, and invent narratives". Death Wallace's father said that David had suffered from major depressive disorder for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. Wallace suffered what was believed to be a severe interaction of the medication with the food he had eaten one day at a restaurant, and in June 2007, on his doctor's advice, he stopped taking phenelzine, his primary antidepressant drug. His depression recurred, and he tried other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. Eventually he went back on phenelzine, but found it ineffective. On September 12, 2008, at age 46, Wallace wrote a private two-page suicide note to his wife, arranged part of the manuscript for The Pale King, and hanged himself on the back porch of his house in Claremont, California. Memorial gatherings were held at Pomona College, Amherst College, the University of Arizona, Illinois State University, and on October 23, 2008, at New York University (NYU). The eulogists at NYU included his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens; his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, an editor at Harper's Magazine; Michael Pietsch, editor of Infinite Jest and later works; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine; and the writers Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen. Legacy In March 2010, it was announced that Wallace's personal papers and archives—drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest—had been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin. They are held at that university's Harry Ransom Center. Since 2011 Loyola University New Orleans has offered English seminar courses on Wallace. Similar courses have also been taught at Harvard University. The first David Foster Wallace Conference was hosted by the Illinois State University Department of English in May 2014; the second was held in May 2015. In January 2017 the International David Foster Wallace Society and