David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine named one of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. In 2008, David Ulin wrote for 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. He graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His honors thesis at Amherst was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System. In his writing, Wallace intentionally avoided tropes of postmodern art such as irony or forms of metafiction, saying in 1990 that they were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. Infinite Jest, his second novel, is known for its unconventional narrative structure and extensive use of endnotes.
Wallace published three short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion: Stories. His short stories and essays were published in outlets like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone magazines, and three collections of his essays were published as books: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster and Both Flesh and Not. Wallace also taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.
In 2008, after struggling with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide at age 46. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Early life and education
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace and James Donald Wallace. The family moved to Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, where he was raised along with his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens. 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 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.
Wallace adapted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System, 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, but soon left the program.
Work
Career
The Broom of the System garnered national attention and critical praise. In The New York Times, Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza... emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., John Irving's World According to Garp".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 obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.
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 moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney-endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester and focused on writing.
Wallace delivered the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech was published as a book, This Is Water, in 2009. In May 2013, parts of the speech were used in a popular online video, also titled "This Is Water".
Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent during his entire career. Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest.
Wallace died in 2008. In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish the manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, that Wallace had been working on before his death. Pietsch pieced the novel together from pages and notes Wallace left behind. Several excerpts were published in The New Yorker and other magazines. The Pale King was published on April 15, 2011, and received generally positive reviews. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that The Pale King "showcases embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America's obsession with self-gratification and entertainment." The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Throughout his career, Wallace published short fiction in periodicals such as 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.
Themes and styles
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", he proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urged literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: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", 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, 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:
Nonfiction
Wallace covered Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign and the September 11 attacks for Rolling Stone; cruise ships, state fairs, and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine; the US Open tournament for Tennis magazine; Roger Federer for The New York Times; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Première magazine; the tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire; the movie-special-effects industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic; and a Maine lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He also reviewed books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, Wallace was among the authors, artists, politicians and others who wrote short pieces on "the future of the American idea".These and other essays appear in three collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster and the posthumous Both Flesh and Not, the last of which contains some of Wallace's earliest work, including his first published essay, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young". Wallace's tennis writing was compiled into a volume titled String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis, published in 2016.
Some writers have found parts of Wallace's nonfiction implausible. Jonathan Franzen has said that he believes Wallace made up dialogue and incidents: "those things didn't actually happen". Of the essays "Shipping Out" and "Ticket to the Fair", John Cook has remarked that in Wallace's nonfiction:
Wallace encounters pitch-perfect characters who speak comedically crystalline lines and place him in hilariously absurd situations...I used both stories as examples of the inescapable temptation to shave, embellish, and invent narratives.