David Foster Wallace
American novelist, essayist and professor
David Foster Wallace was an American writer and professor, best known for the novel Infinite Jest. He also wrote short stories, essays and nonfiction.
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American Born 1962 in Ithaca, United States Died 2008
Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein
About David Foster Wallace
Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and grew up in Illinois. He studied at Amherst College and the University of Arizona. A senior thesis he wrote at Amherst, covering philosophy and modal logic, was reworked into his debut novel, The Broom of the System (1987). He later taught at Pomona College, Emerson College and Illinois State University, in English and creative writing. His stories and essays appeared in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. His story collections are Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion: Stories. His essays were gathered in Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He also wrote Everything and More, a book on the history of infinity in set theory. He played tennis as a teenager and often wrote about the sport. Our catalog includes String Theory. Wallace died in 2008. He left The Pale King unfinished: it came out in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.