David Foster Wallace

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.