David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest which was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was a tennis player and majored in English and philosophy at Amherst College, graduating summa cum laude in 1985.^[1] Aside from writing novels, he wrote short stories in magazines such as Playboy, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and others. Wallace also wrote nonfiction. He covered Senator John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign and the September 11, 2001 attacks for Rolling Stone. In the November 2007 issue of Atlantic monthly, Wallace questioned whether terrorist attacks were unavoidable "without subverting the very principles that make [America] worth protecting?"^[2]

Wallace committed suicide by hanging on Friday, September 12, 2008, at age 46.^[1]

Books[edit]

• The Broom of the System (1987)
• The Girl With Curious Hair (1989)
• Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990)
• Infinite Jest (1996)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
• Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999)
• Up, Simba! (2000)
• Everything and More (2003)
• Oblivion: Stories (2004)
• Consider the Lobster (2005)
• McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (2008)
• Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2011)
• The Pale King (2011)

References[edit]

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin
2. ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/wallace-safety