David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and professor whose work crossed novels, short stories, essays, and teaching. Born in Ithaca, New York, he was raised in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, with his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens. His father, James Donald Wallace, taught philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his mother, Sally Jean Wallace, taught English at Parkland College. That household, close to both argument and language, helps explain the unusual mix of logic, comedy, and moral pressure that later marked his writing.

Wallace attended Amherst College, where he majored in English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude in 1985. He studied modal logic and mathematics, and his senior thesis in philosophy won the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. His English honors thesis became the manuscript for his first novel, The Broom of the System, published in 1987. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona the same year, then briefly entered graduate study in philosophy at Harvard before leaving the program.

He gained national attention with The Broom of the System, but his best-known book is Infinite Jest, published in 1996. The novel is known for its unconventional structure and extensive endnotes, and Time later named it one of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. Wallace also published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion: Stories, along with essay collections including A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. His work appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, and The Paris Review.

Wallace’s way of thinking was shaped by more than books. As an adolescent he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, an experience he later wrote about in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” He also thought hard about belief, twice attempting to join the Catholic Church before later attending a Mennonite church. In essays and interviews, he pushed against the irony and metafiction associated with postmodern art, saying in 1990 that they were “agents of a great despair and stasis” in contemporary American culture. He wanted fiction to move past shallow cleverness toward a more direct reckoning with attention, entertainment, and self-consciousness.

Alongside writing, Wallace taught English, literature, and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, where in 2002 he became the first Roy E. Disney-endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English. In 2005, he delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College, later published as This Is Water. After struggling with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide in 2008 at age 46. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and became a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Readers still return to his sentences because they are restless, funny, exacting, and deeply alert to the pressures of being conscious in modern American life.