David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (born February 21, 1962, Ithaca, New York, U.S.—died September 12, 2008, Claremont, California) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose dense works provide a dark, often satirical analysis of American culture. His best-known work is the immense, endnote-laden novel Infinite Jest (1996).

(Read Britannica’s article “Massive Tomes: 10 of the World’s Longest Novels.”)

Early life and education

Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, a pair of contiguous university cities in central Illinois. He was the son of James Wallace, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and Sally (Foster) Wallace, an English teacher at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign. His parents were avid readers who exposed Wallace and his sister, Amy, to such weighty opuses as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) while they were young children. One of Wallace’s friends, Mark Costello, once said of his upbringing, “This was the kind of family where the mother would bring home the Encyclopædia Britannica for the family to read through.”

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Wallace played tennis as a teenager and ranked in the regional junior division. He received a B.A. from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1985. At Amherst he served as managing editor of the college’s humor magazine. He was completing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona when his highly regarded debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was published. He later taught creative writing at Illinois State University and at Pomona College in California. He received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship grant in 1997.

Infinite Jest

Wallace became best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), a massive, multilayered novel that he wrote over the course of four years. In it appear a sweeping cast of postmodern characters that range from recovering alcoholics and foreign statesmen to residents of a halfway house and high-school tennis stars. Presenting a futuristic vision of a world in which advertising has become omnipresent and the populace is addicted to consumerism, Infinite Jest takes place during calendar years that have been named by companies that purchased the rights to promote their products.

Infinite Jest was notably the first work of Wallace’s to feature what was to become his stylistic hallmark: the prominent use of notes (endnotes, in this case), which were Wallace’s attempt to reproduce the nonlinearity of human thought on the page. Critics, who found Wallace’s self-conscious, meandering writing style variously exhilarating and maddening, compared Infinite Jest to the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. A culture writer at The Guardian likened it to a “Gen-X Ulysses.”

Other books

Wallace’s short stories are collected in Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion (2004). He was also an acclaimed nonfiction writer, using his signature digressive, footnote-heavy prose to produce elaborate essays on such seemingly uncomplicated subjects as the Illinois state fair, talk radio, and luxury cruises. His essay collections include A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (2005). Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003) is a survey of the mathematical concept of infinity. He also wrote, with Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990; 2nd edition 1997).

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Death and posthumous works

Wallace had suffered from depression since his early 20s, and, after numerous failed attempts to find an efficacious drug regimen, he took his own life. Three years after Wallace’s death, another novel, The Pale King (2011), which the author had left unfinished, was released. The book was assembled by Michael Pietsch, who had long been Wallace’s editor. It is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Peoria, Illinois, during the late 20th century. Most of its characters are examiners of annual income tax returns, and the book’s central theme is boredom—specifically, boredom as a potential means of attaining bliss and, as such, an alternative to the culture of overstimulation that is the main subject of Infinite Jest. A third collection of his nonfiction writing, Both Flesh and Not (2012), was also published posthumously.

In 2010 Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky published Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a memoir that recounts the five days he spent traveling with Wallace throughout the Midwest for his Infinite Jest book tour. Lipsky’s memoir was adapted into the 2015 film The End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky.