David Foster Wallace author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, sous licence CC BY 2.0.

David Foster Wallace

Né(e): 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.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

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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Citations

quote
The capital-T Truth is about life before death
-This Is Water
quote
Language is everything and everywhere: it’s what lets us have anything to do with one another
-Tense Present
quote
The ship was so clean and white it looked boiled
-Voluntarily and For Pay
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Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind
-Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes
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The Disease makes its command headquarters in the head
-An Interval
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I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it
-All That

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Voix de la Communauté

"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"

Don DeLillo

"David Foster Wallace was one of the most audacious fiction writers of the last two decades"

The Week

"David Foster Wallace, who died on September 12th, at the age of forty-six, was in many ways a writer of his time"

The New Yorker

"George Eliot was a genius, David Foster Wallace was a genius"

Zadie Smith

"David Foster Wallace was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years"

David Ulin

"David Foster Wallace became known as one of the most significant writers of his generation"

The Washington Post

"David Foster Wallace: Author of 'Infinite Jest' who many regarded as a writer of genius"

The Independent

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