David Foster Wallace
Born: February 21, 1962 – Ithaca, New York, United States
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist and essayist known for intellectually ambitious, darkly comic writing on consciousness, addiction, media, and contemporary culture. His best-known works include Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster, and The Pale King, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; he also received a 1997 MacArthur Fellowship.
Biography & Author's Journey
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, on February 21, 1962, and grew up largely in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in an academically oriented household: his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English. As a teenager he was a strong competitive tennis player, an experience that later fed both his fiction and essays. He attended Amherst College, where he studied English and philosophy, and his undergraduate work already showed the unusual combination that would define him: analytic rigor, comic excess, and a deep interest in consciousness. After Amherst, he completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arizona and also spent time in graduate study in philosophy at Harvard before leaving academia’s formal track for literary work and teaching.
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Community Voices
"David Foster Wallace was a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent, one unafraid to tackle subjects large and small"
— The New York Times Book Review
"The work of David Foster Wallace, so vitally and fearlessly attached to the culture around it, will be a source of exploration for generations to come"
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"David Foster Wallace, who died on September 12th, at the age of forty-six, was in many ways a writer of his time"
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