David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace grew up in Illinois, the son of a philosophy professor and an English teacher. He studied at Amherst College and earned an MFA from the University of Arizona before completing a philosophy degree simultaneously. He went on to teach at Illinois State University and later Pomona College, where he was by most accounts a serious and generous teacher, the kind who read student work with real attention. He died by suicide in September 2008 at 46, after a long struggle with depression and the failure of a medication change.

His first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was published when he was 24 and announced a writer of unusual ambition — formally playful, philosophically loaded, already straining against the page. But the work that defined his reputation was Infinite Jest (1996), a 1,079-page novel set in a near-future North America organized around a film so entertaining it destroys the will of anyone who watches it. The novel follows residents of a Boston halfway house and students at a nearby tennis academy across a timeline of competitive consumption and addiction. Its footnotes — 388 of them, some spanning pages — became both a celebrated formal device and a convenient target for readers who found the whole enterprise exhausting. The book is genuinely funny, genuinely moving, and genuinely difficult; those three qualities coexist more fully than his critics have allowed.

His essay collections are where many readers find him most directly. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005) contain work that functions as a form of immersive journalism charged with philosophical anxiety: an essay on David Lynch, one on the Illinois State Fair, one on the Maine Lobster Festival that turns into an argument about whether lobsters feel pain. "This Is Water," the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address published posthumously as a book, is the most widely circulated distillation of his thinking about attention, empathy, and what it means to choose how you see other people.

The nonfiction collection The Pale King, his unfinished third novel about IRS workers in Illinois and the problem of sustained attention, was assembled and published posthumously in 2011. It is uneven by definition but contains some of his finest prose — passages about boredom and bureaucracy that are anything but boring.

Wallace's central preoccupation was sincerity in an age of irony: how to mean something when the culture has made earnestness into a form of naivety. He wanted fiction that made readers feel less alone. He also wanted, badly, to be admired, and the two impulses created real friction in his work. The footnotes, the self-consciousness, the sheer length — these can read as generosity or as performance depending on your tolerance. His female characters are often thinly drawn, and the emotional geography of his fiction skews heavily toward male interiority. The biography of Wallace that emerged after his death — D.T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (2012) — revealed a man whose treatment of women in his personal life was sometimes seriously harmful, a fact that now accompanies readings of his work.

The critical debate about whether Infinite Jest is a masterpiece or an act of talented self-indulgence has not resolved. Both positions have merit. What is not seriously disputed is that Wallace changed what serious American fiction felt permitted to do — its range of tones, its relationship to popular culture, its willingness to be explicit about emotional stakes. His influence on a generation of writers is visible enough to have produced its own backlash, which is one mark of significance.