David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing.

Wallace attended Amherst College, his father's alma mater, where he majored in English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude in 1985.

Among other extracurricular activities, he participated in glee club; his sister recalls that he "had a lovely singing voice".

In studying philosophy, Wallace pursued modal logic and mathematics, and presented in 1985 a senior thesis in philosophy and modal logic that was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and posthumously published as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2010).

Wallace adapted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and committed to being a writer.

He told David Lipsky: "Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent."

Wallace completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987.

He moved to Massachusetts to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but soon left the program.

The Broom of the System (1987) garnered national attention and critical praise.

In The New York Times, Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza ... emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., [and] John Irving's World According to Garp".

In 1989, he spent four weeks at McLean Hospital—a psychiatric institute in Belmont, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard Medical School—where he completed a drug and alcohol detoxification program.

He later said his time there changed his life.

Dogs were important to Wallace, and he spoke of opening a shelter for stray canines.

According to his friend Jonathan Franzen, he "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them".

In the early 1990s, Wallace was in a relationship with writer Mary Karr.

She later described Wallace as obsessive about her and said the relationship was volatile, with Wallace once throwing a coffee table at her as well as physically forcing her out of a car, leaving her to walk home.

Years later, she claimed that Wallace's biographer D. T. Max underreported Wallace's abuse.

Of Max's account of their relationship, she tweeted: "That's about 2% of what happened."

She said that Wallace kicked her, climbed up the side of her house at night, and followed her five-year-old son home from school.

In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston.

The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University.

He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993.

After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.

Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

His mother was an English professor at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, which recognized her work with a "Professor of the Year" award in 1996.

From fourth grade, Wallace lived with his family in Urbana, where he attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School, Brookens Junior High School and Urbana High School.

As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player.

He wrote about this period in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", originally published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes".

Although his parents were atheists, Wallace twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, but "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry".

He later attended a Mennonite church.

In 2002, Wallace met the painter Karen L. Green, whom he married on December 27, 2004.

Wallace struggled with depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal tendencies, and was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric care.

After struggling with depression for many years, he died by suicide in 2008, at age 46.

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace ( Foster) and James Donald Wallace.

The family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he was raised along with his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens.

His father was a philosophy professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012.

The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".

Wallace grew up in Illinois and attended Amherst College.

He taught English at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.