David Foster Wallace

American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist

• Born: February 21, 1962
• Birthplace: Ithaca, New York
• Died: September 12, 2008
• Place of death: Claremont, California

Biography

David Foster Wallace grew up in Urbana, Illinois, the son of a philosophy professor and community college English teacher. He was a talented, competitive tennis player whose gifts for the game included excessive sweating in order to keep well ventilated and the ability to ascertain the differential complications between the angles of the court and the unpredictable midwestern winds that often seized balls while in play. Wallace majored in philosophy at Amherst College. His professors believed he would become an important philosopher, but after taking time off to drive a school bus, he completed his senior thesis as a creative piece, which would soon be picked up as a rough draft of his first novel, The Broom of the System. From there, he headed west for Arizona State University’s creative writing program.

The Broom of the System earned for Wallace a Whiting Writer’s Award and gained the twenty-five-year-old some cult and critical notoriety. The novel’s story line is built on phone messages, literary magazine submissions, and psychotherapy sessions. Readers come to realize that the central character’s search for her missing grandmother is actually a pursuit of her own identity. Wallace uses stylized wordplay to represent the notion that something’s value is nothing more or less than its function, a concept fostered by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that language is a means by which reality is constructed. His postmodernist plot fragmentation, need to express philosophical ideas through fiction, and old-fashioned concern for character development are reflective of Wallace’s wide range of early influences, which include Donald Barthelme and Tobias Wolff. They are also staple concepts that persist throughout Wallace’s work.

His second book, Girl with Curious Hair, is a short-story collection assimilating American history, pop culture, and its icons with central characters that embody certain ideologies. A slacker takes an internship with Lyndon Johnson in “Lyndon,” while “Little Expressionless Animals” deals with the plans of the producers of Jeopardy!, the television game show, to eject a long-running champion because of her sexual orientation. This focus on pop culture is carried over into Wallace’s nonfiction with Signifying Rappers, a book cowritten with Mark Costello, wherein two white males use an obscure language to discuss the violence, misogyny, and arrogance often associated with hip-hop. Throughout his early years as a writer, Wallace was praised for the inventiveness and energy displayed in his writing, sometimes referred to as a genius restoring opulence to fiction after the dominance of minimalism.

Though Wallace compared a writer’s fame to that of a local meteorologist, the early attention scathed him. Just as his writing reflects brilliance mixed with humility, Wallace was unsure whether to believe those who dubbed him genius or the lurking internal whisper sometimes calling him fake. Driven by self-doubt and confusion as to what it means to be a famous writer, Wallace went through a three-year period of using drugs and alcohol during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, while living in Boston and Syracuse. Eventually, he checked into a psychiatric ward and was put on suicide watch. While details remain vague, friends have said Wallace sought the help of recovery programs. In the end, he came to realize he lacked the stomach for heavy drinking and the nervous system necessary for constant drug use. In 1990 he took a teaching position at Illinois State University, where he remained until 2002, and took up residence in a sparsely decorated home, with no television set, located amid cornfields.

Personal experience seems to have played a heavy role in Wallace’s 1,079-page novel, the highly publicized Infinite Jest. Wallace said that he wanted to write something sad. The book parallels a substance abuse program with an elite tennis academy and revolves around the search for a film titled Infinite Jest, to which viewers become addicted. Central characters are a tennis star, an addict from a rehabilitation center, and a group of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists; all want to use the film as a weapon. The novel’s massive length and its 304 footnotes are reflective of Wallace’s need not to spare a detail, a trait that seems to arise from both his meticulousness and his effulgence. While acknowledging the difficulty he posed for readers, he imagined the book’s audience akin to himself: educated people in their twenties and thirties who read persistently in the hope of eventual payoff. The same year that Infinite Jest came out, the Lannan Foundation awarded Wallace its Literary Award for fiction.

This affinity for details and footnotes carried over into his essay writing. Contracted to write various essays for Harper’s and other magazines, Wallace attempted to capture and interpret his time. He allowed his own life, his attitude, and his ideas to spill through. The result was a body of essays in which he is the central character, experiencing and commenting upon everything, from luxury cruises to cracked midwestern tennis courts. For a while, his phone rang constantly, bringing offers to write what he described as assignments for which his instructions basically involved standing in a certain location, turning 360 degrees, and describing what he saw. He published the essays, unabridged, in 1997’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. That same year, he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, otherwise known as the “genius grant.”

Upon his return to fiction, Wallace was interested in writing about sex and relationships. In 1999 he published Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of short stories and imagined interviews. While some readers continued to applaud his ability to invent ways of storytelling, others wondered where to find the emotion of the story. Still, many found the writing to be within Wallace’s normal range of hilarious, unsettling, and almost unbearable edginess. He followed this up with an additional collection of short stories entitled Oblivion. This effort met with a generally favorable critical reception. Nevertheless, critics considered Wallace's long fiction and essays to be superior vehicles for his thoughts, as he tended toward verbosity and digression.

Around the same time that Oblivion appeared, Wallace produced two more works of nonfiction, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity and Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Everything and More tackles the mathematical concept of infinity, incorporating history and philosophy as well. Consider the Lobster arguably became the best-known collection of Wallace's essays on modern American culture, from sex to entertainment to politics.

Wallace was on leave from his position as creative writing professor at Pomona College in September, 2008 when he was found dead at his home in Claremont, California. He had hanged himself. His originality has placed him somewhere between the camps of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Wolfe; meaning is often found within the cracks of his narratives. Wallace’s truest self seemed to come out in his essays. The brilliance and competitiveness displayed early in his life shine through with the originality of his work, making him a force in American literature.

Since Wallace's death, a couple works of criticism, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will and Both Flesh and Not, have also been published, along with his Kenyon commencement address and his writings on writing and on tennis. Most significantly, Wallace's wife, Amy, reportedly found the chapters to an incomplete final novel about IRS tax collectors in the garage where he had written his suicide note. The resulting book, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; however, no award was given that year.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Broom of the System, 1987

Infinite Jest, 1996

The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel, 2012

Short Fiction:

Girl with Curious Hair, 1989

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories, 1999

Oblivion, 2004

Nonfiction:

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, 1990 (with Mark Costello)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 1997

Up, Simba! Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate, 2000 (reprinted as McCain's Promise, 2008)

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, 2003

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, 2005

This Is Water, 2009

Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will 2011

Both Flesh and Not, 2012

Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing, 2013

String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis, 2016

Bibliography

Blythe, Will, ed. Why I Write: Thoughts on the Practice of Fiction. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. This collection of twenty-five essays on fiction writing includes Wallace’s “The Nature of the Fun.”

Bruni, Frank. “The Grunge American Novel.” The New York Times Magazine, March 24, 1996, 38-41. Offers an author profile of Wallace in the midst of the excitement generated by the publication of Infinite Jest. Nominates him as the literary spokesman for the 1990’s generation.

LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique 38, no. 1 (Fall, 1996): 12-37. Compares Wallace’s Infinite Jest with the ambitious novels of his contemporaries, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) and William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987). LeClair explores the root of the word “prodigious,” demonstrating how these authors display a vast range of encyclopedic information in their fiction in order to reorient readers with the natural world.

Olsen, Lance. “Termite Art, or Wallace’s Wittgenstein.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer, 1993). Demonstrates the ways in which philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein greatly influenced Wallace’s writing: Both use cynicism as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself.

Rother, James. “Reading and Riding the Post-scientific Wave: The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer, 1993). Seeks to demonstrate how Wallace’s work differs from popular postmodern literature. Rother argues that the writer’s “craftiness” is just part of his pursuit for higher meaning.

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. Argues that the self-conscious irony of metafictionist writing has been absorbed by the mass media. Asserts that innovative art must posit new values rather than merely expose false ones. An indispensable text for students of twentieth century American literature.

Wallace, David Foster. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Interview by Larry McCaffrey. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer, 1993). In an extensive and cerebral interview, Wallace demonstrates the outspokenness and intelligence for which his work is often lauded.