High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. After Wallace`s suicide on September 12, 2008, a manuscript and associated computer files were found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.