David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was born February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Urbana, Illinois, son of a philosophy professor and an English teacher. A regionally ranked junior tennis player, he later wrote that growing up amid Midwestern tornado weather taught him more about geometry and fear than any classroom. He followed his father to Amherst College, majored in English and philosophy, and wrote an honors thesis on modal logic and free will good enough to win a college prize and later become its own book. His other senior thesis, a novel manuscript, became his first book. He finished an MFA at Arizona in 1987, and two years later spent four weeks at McLean Hospital outside Boston in treatment for alcohol and drug dependency.

His novel The Broom of the System appeared in 1987 to strong reviews, and he spent the early 1990s teaching and writing what became Infinite Jest, a 1,079-page novel published in 1996 with hundreds of endnotes, built around a halfway house, a tennis academy, and a film so entertaining it kills anyone who watches it. Time later named it one of the hundred best English-language novels of the previous century. He published three story collections and three essay collections, writing for Harper's, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone on subjects from cruise ships to Roger Federer to the Maine Lobster Festival, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. In 2005 he delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College about paying attention, later published as the short book This Is Water.

His reputation rests partly on This Is Water's ethic of paying attention to other people instead of the self, which sits uneasily against his conduct toward the writer Mary Karr, whom he dated in the early 1990s. She has said he threw a coffee table at her, forced her from a moving car, and later stalked her, climbing onto her roof and following her young son; other women, including former students, told her similar stories. Wallace battled depression from his teens on and took the antidepressant Nardil for roughly two decades. In June 2007, worried it was interfering with his writing, he went off it on his doctor's advice; the depression returned severely, electroconvulsive therapy and a return to the drug did not help, and on September 12, 2008, at 46, he died by suicide at his Claremont, California, home.

Little, Brown pieced his unfinished novel The Pale King together from drawers of manuscript pages and published it in 2011; it was a Pulitzer finalist. His papers went to the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center in 2010, and university seminars on his work followed at Harvard and elsewhere. A 2015 film, The End of the Tour, dramatized a five-day interview he gave during the Infinite Jest book tour, reviving interest in him for a generation too young to have read the novel on release. The allegations Karr made became part of that reconsideration rather than separate from it, complicating a writer whose admirers had spent years treating his voice as a moral instruction manual.

David Foster Wallace's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Broom of the System book
  His debut novel, developed from his Amherst senior thesis 1987
• Infinite Jest book
  1,079 pages; later named one of Time's hundred best English-language novels 1996
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again book
  Essay collection, including the title piece on a Caribbean cruise 1997
• This Is Water speech
  Kenyon College commencement address, published as a short book in 2009 2005
• The Pale King book
  Unfinished novel assembled posthumously from his manuscript pages 2011

• 1980 aged ~18 Enrolls at Amherst College, his father's alma mater
• 1985 aged ~23 Graduates Amherst summa cum laude with a thesis on modal logic and free will
• 1987 aged ~25 Publishes his debut novel, The Broom of the System, and finishes an MFA at Arizona
• 1989 aged ~27 Completes a month of treatment at McLean Hospital for depression and substance abuse
• 1996 aged ~34 Publishes Infinite Jest
• 1997 aged ~35 Wins a MacArthur Fellowship
• May 21, 2005 aged 43 Delivers the This Is Water commencement address at Kenyon College
• September 12, 2008 aged 46 Dies by suicide at his home in Claremont, California
• 2011 aged ~49 The Pale King is published posthumously and named a Pulitzer finalist

• John Updike 1932–2009
  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose Rabbit series chronicled the anxieties of suburban American men. criticized
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. criticized
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. criticized