Background and career
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996). In 2008, David Ulin wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Wallace was "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace grew up in Illinois, and graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His Amherst honors thesis on philosophy and modal logic was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987). Wallace taught English and creative writing at Illinois State University, Emerson College, and Pomona College. As a writer of "post-postmodern" literature, Wallace intentionally avoided many tropes of postmodern art, including forms of irony and metafiction, asserting in 1990 that such tropes were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. He often wrote about tennis, which he played as a teenager; Infinite Jest is partly set in a tennis academy. The novel is known for its length; unconventional narrative structure, involving numerous endnotes; and exemplification of the encyclopedic novel and hysterical realist literary style. Wallace's short stories and essays were published in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. His short stories were collected in three books: Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion: Stories (2004). His essays are collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005), and Both Flesh and Not (2012). He wrote two nonfiction books: Signifying Rappers (1990), on cross-cultural communication in hip-hop (co-authored with Mark Costello), and Everything and More (2003), on the history of infinity in set theory. In 2008, after struggling with depression for decades, Wallace died by suicide. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace (née Foster) and James D. Wallace. The family moved to Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, where he and his younger sister, Amy, were raised. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His mother was an English professor at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, which recognized her work with a "Professor of the Year" award in 1996. From fourth grade, Wallace lived with his family in Urbana, where he attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School, Brookens Junior High School, and Urbana High School. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He wrote about this period in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", originally published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes". Although his parents were atheists, Wallace twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, but "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry". He later attended a Mennonite church. Wallace attended Amherst College, his father's alma mater, where he majored in English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude in 1985. Among other extracurricular activities, he participated in glee club; his sister recalls that he "had a lovely singing voice". In studying philosophy, Wallace pursued modal logic and mathematics, and presented in 1985 a senior thesis in philosophy and modal logic that was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and posthumously published as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2010). Wallace adapted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and committed to being a writer. He told David Lipsky: "Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." Wallace completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987. He moved back to Massachusetts to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University in fall 1989, but soon left the program.
Wallace published short fiction in periodicals including The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's Magazine, Playboy, The Paris Review, Mid-American Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, Open City, Puerto del Sol, and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent for his entire career. In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace was hired by the English department at Illinois State University. In 1997, Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship. He also received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, awarded by editors of The Paris Review, for one of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which had been published in the magazine. In 2002, Wallace became the first Roy E. Disney-endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester and focused on writing.
Wallace wanted to progress beyond the irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism and explore a post-postmodern or metamodern style. In the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (written 1990, published 1993), he proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urged literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness:
I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems. Wallace used many forms of irony, but tended to focus on individual persons' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society. Wallace's fiction combines narrative modes and authorial voices that incorporate jargon and invented vocabulary, such as self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long, multi-clause sentences, and an extensive use of explanatory endnotes and footnotes, as in Infinite Jest and the story "Octet" (collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and most of his non-fiction after 1996. In a 1997 interview on Charlie Rose, Wallace said that the notes were to disrupt the linear narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the narrative structure, and that he could have jumbled the sentences "but then no one would read it". Much of Wallace's writing contains philosophical and mathematical ideas and references. D. T. Max has described Wallace's work as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded", often featuring multiple protagonists and spanning different locations in a single work. His writing comments on the fragmentation of thought, the relationship between happiness and boredom, and the psychological tension between the beauty and hideousness of the human body. According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he said he wanted to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help the reader "become less alone inside". In his Kenyon College commencement address (later published as This Is Water), Wallace described the human condition as daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warned against succumbing to solipsism, invoking the existential values of compassion and mindfulness:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. ... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.
