David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Champaign, Illinois, where both of his parents were academics. His father was a philosophy professor and his mother an English teacher, and Wallace grew up in an intellectually stimulating household that nonetheless failed to insulate him from the depression and anxiety that would shadow his entire life. He was a nationally ranked junior tennis player in his youth — an experience that became central to his fiction and his essays — before attending Amherst College, where he majored in both English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude. He pursued graduate study in philosophy at Harvard before shifting entirely to creative writing, earning an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1987.
Wallace’s debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), written in part as his Amherst senior thesis, displayed his precocious facility with postmodern technique and his philosophical training, drawing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to explore questions of selfhood and communication. His short fiction collection Girl with Curious Hair (1989) confirmed his reputation as one of the most technically brilliant and intellectually voracious young writers in America. But it was the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996 that made his reputation definitive and cemented his status as the defining literary voice of his generation.
Infinite Jest is a novel of extraordinary ambition and complexity: at nearly 1,100 pages, with more than 380 endnotes, it interweaves the stories of a tennis academy, a nearby halfway house, and a fatally entertaining film in a near-future North America defined by entertainment addiction and political fragmentation. The novel is formally experimental but also deeply humane, and its central preoccupations — with the nature of genuine human connection in a culture of ironic detachment, with addiction as a metaphor for the condition of modern consciousness, with the possibility of sincerity in a world saturated by irony — resonated with readers with unusual force. It became a cultural touchstone that has only grown in significance.
Wallace’s prose style is immediately recognizable: long, footnote-laden sentences that enact the recursive quality of anxious, self-aware thought; a willingness to use the full range of American vernacular, from technical jargon to slang; and a constant tension between the desire to communicate directly and the awareness of all the ways language can fail. He wrote with a desperate urgency about the difficulty of genuine connection, and his best work — including the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster — demonstrates a nonfiction voice of comparable brilliance.
David Foster Wallace died by suicide on September 12, 2008, at the age of forty-six, after a lifelong struggle with depression. His posthumously published novel The Pale King (2011), left unfinished at his death, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His legacy is that of a writer who pushed the formal possibilities of American fiction to their limits while never losing sight of the essentially moral purpose of literature: to make the reader feel less alone.
