David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace
Wallace in January 2006
Born	(1962-02-21)February 21, 1962 Ithaca, New York, United States
Died	Claremont, California, United States
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist, college professor
Alma mater	Amherst College (B.A.) University of Arizona (M.F.A.) Harvard University (dropped out) Cornell University
Period	1987–2008
Genre	Literary fiction, non-fiction
Literary movement	Postmodern literature, Post-postmodernism, hysterical realism
Notable works	Infinite Jest (1996) A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) The Pale King (unfinished, 2011)

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, short stories and essays, as well as a professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

Wallace's last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A biography of Wallace was published in September 2012, and an extensive critical literature on his work has developed in the past decade.

Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin has called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."

Work

Career

David Foster Wallace giving a reading for Booksmith at San Francisco's All Saints Church in 2006

Wallace's first novel, 1987's The Broom of the System, garnered national attention and critical praise. Caryn James of The New York Times called it a successful "manic, human, flawed extravaganza", "emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., John Irving's World According to Garp".

In 1991 he began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the behest 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.

In 1997, Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, awarded by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews—"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6"—which had appeared in the magazine.

In 2002, he moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester and focused on writing.

Wallace delivered the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech was published as a book called This Is Water in 2009. In May 2013, portions of the speech were used in a popular online video also titled "This is Water".

Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent through his entire career. Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest.

In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish the manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, that Wallace had been working on before his death. The Pale King was pieced together by Pietsch from pages and notes the author left behind. Several excerpts were published in The New Yorker and other magazines. The Pale King was published on April 15, 2011, and received generally positive reviews.

Throughout his career, Wallace published short fiction in periodicals such as The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's Magazine, Playboy, The Paris Review, Mid-American Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, Open City, and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Themes and styles

Wallace's fiction is often concerned with moving beyond the irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism. For example, his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, proposes that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urges literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: "I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems." Wallace used many forms of irony, but focused on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unselfconscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.

Wallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. His writing features self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and extensive use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in "Octet" as well as in the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, "but then no one would read it".

D.T. Max describes Wallace's work as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded", often spanning a multitude of locations and protagonists within a single novel. It often commented on the fragmentation of thought, the relationship between happiness and boredom, and the tension between the beauty and hideousness of human physicality. According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being," and he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside." In his Kenyon College commencement address, he describes the human condition of daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warns against solipsism, invoking compassion, mindfulness, and existentialism:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

Wallace's work has been cited as an influence and inspiration by many writers, including Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Wurtzel, George Saunders, Rivka Galchen, Matthew Gallaway, David Gordon, Darin Strauss, Charles Yu, and Deb Olin Unferth.

Non-fiction work

Wallace covered Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign and the September 11 attacks for Rolling Stone; cruise ships (in what became the title essay of his first nonfiction book), state fairs, and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine; the US Open tournament for TENNIS Magazine; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Premiere magazine; the tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire; the special-effects film industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic Monthly; and a Maine lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He also reviewed books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, Wallace was among the authors, artists, politicians and others who wrote short pieces on "the future of the American idea".

Personal life

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, the son of Sally Jean (née Foster) and James Donald Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school and Urbana High School. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, an experience he reflects upon in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (first published in Harper's Magazine under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes").

James D. Wallace, David's father, was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now Emeritus Professor. David's mother, Sally Foster Wallace, attended graduate school in English composition at the University of Illinois and became a professor of English at Parkland College—a community college in Champaign—where she won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996.

Wallace attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy. He participated in several extracurricular activities, including glee club; Wallace's sister recalls that "David had a lovely singing voice." Within philosophy Wallace pursued interests in modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and published posthumously as Fate, Time, and Language. His other honors thesis, written for his English major, eventually became his first novel, The Broom of the System. Wallace graduated summa cum laude for both theses in 1985. By the end of his undergraduate education, Wallace was committed to fiction; he told David Lipsky, "Writing [Broom], I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." He pursued a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona, completing it in 1987, by which time Broom had been published. Wallace moved to Boston for graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but left the program soon after.

In the early 1990s, Wallace became obsessed with the memoirist Mary Karr. Despite her statements that she was not interested, Wallace got her name tattooed on his body and even contemplated killing her husband, according to biographer D.T. Max. The two later had a tumultuous relationship during which, Karr reported, Wallace once threw a coffee table at her and attempted to push her out of a car.

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

Wallace struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, depression, suicide attempts, institutionalization, and at times inappropriate sexual behavior. Wallace is reported to have slept with some of his female students while teaching at university and sometimes exhibited stalking-like obsessive behavior when enamored of a woman.

Dogs played an important role in Wallace's life: Wallace was very close to his two dogs, Bella and Werner, had spoken of opening a dog shelter, and, according to Jonathan Franzen, "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."

Born to atheist parents, Wallace attempted to join the Catholic Church twice but "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry," and later attended a Mennonite church.

Death

Wallace died by suicide on September 12, 2008, at age 46. Wallace's father reported in an interview that his son had suffered from depression for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. When Wallace experienced severe side effects from the medication, he attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant, phenelzine. On his doctor's advice, Wallace stopped taking the medication in June 2007, and the depression returned. Wallace received other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. When he returned to phenelzine, he found that it had lost its effectiveness. His wife kept a watchful eye on him in the following days, but on September 12, Wallace went into the garage, wrote a two-page note, and arranged part of the manuscript for The Pale King before hanging himself from a patio rafter.

Numerous gatherings were held to honor Wallace after his death, including memorial services at Pomona College, Amherst College, the University of Arizona, Illinois State University, and on October 23, 2008, at New York University—the last with speakers including his sister, Amy Wallace Havens; his agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, the editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, editor at Harper's Magazine; Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest and Wallace's later work; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker; and authors Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello (Wallace was the godfather of Costello's daughter, Delia), Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.

Legacy

Wallace's legacy was described by author and notable Wallace interviewer David Lipsky: "We think a thousand things at a time, and David found a way to get all that across in a way that's incredibly true and incredibly entertaining at the same time. He found that junction.… He was the one voice I absolutely trusted to make sense of the outside world for me. Anyone that picks up his work for the next 50 years will have their antenna polished and sharpened, and they'll be receiving many more channels than they were aware of."

In March 2010, it was announced that Wallace's personal papers and archives—drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest—had been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin. They reside at the University's Harry Ransom Center.

The first annual David Foster Wallace Conference was hosted by the Illinois State University Department of English in May 2014; the second conference was held in May 2015.

Since 2011, Loyola University New Orleans has offered English seminar courses on Wallace. Similar courses are also taught at Harvard University.

Adaptations

Film and television

A filmed adaptation of Brief Interviews, directed by John Krasinski with an ensemble cast, was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It received poor reviews.

The Simpsons episode "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again" (2012) is loosely based on Wallace's essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". The Simpson family takes a cruise, and Wallace appears in the background of a scene, wearing a tuxedo T-shirt while eating in the ship's dining room; Wallace recounts having worn such a T-shirt "at formal suppers."

The End of the Tour is a film based on David Lipsky's conversations with Wallace in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, with Jason Segel playing Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky. The film won an Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival and Segel was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.

"Partridge", a Season 5 episode of NBC's Parks and Recreation, repeatedly references Infinite Jest, of which the show's co-creator, Michael Schur, is a noted fan. Schur also directed the music video for The Decemberists' "Calamity Song", which depicts the Eschaton game from Infinite Jest.

Stage and music

Twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men were adapted into a stage play in 2000, the first theatrical adaptation of Wallace's work. The play, Hideous Men, adapted and directed by Dylan McCullough, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2000.

Brief Interviews was also adapted by director Marc Caellas as a play called Brief Interviews With Hideous Writers, which premiered at Fundación Tomás Eloy Martinez in Buenos Aires on November 4, 2011.

The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was adapted by composer Eric Moe into a 50-minute operatic piece, to be performed with accompanying video projections. The piece was described as having "subversively inscribed classical music into pop culture".

Infinite Jest was performed once as a stage play by Germany’s experimental theater Hebbel am Ufer. The play was staged in various locations throughout Berlin, and the action took place over a 24-hour period.

"Good Old Neon", from Oblivion: Stories, was adapted and performed live by Ian Forester at the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival, produced by Los Angeles independent theater company Needtheater.

List of works

Main article: David Foster Wallace bibliography

Novels

• The Broom of the System (1987)
• Infinite Jest (1996)
• The Pale King (2011) (published posthumously in unfinished form)

Short story collections

• Girl with Curious Hair (1989) (published in Europe as Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way)
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
• Oblivion: Stories (2004)

Non-fiction

• Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990), coauthored with Mark Costello
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (essays) (1997)
• Up, Simba! (2000)
• Everything and More (2003)
• Consider the Lobster (essays) (2005)
• McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (paperback reprint of Up, Simba!) (2008)
• This Is Water (2009)
• Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, Eds. S. Cahn and M. Eckert, Columbia University Press (2011)
• Both Flesh and Not (essays) (2012)

Awards and honors

• Pulitzer Prize nomination for "The Pale King", 2012 (no Fiction Prize was awarded that year)
• Inclusion of "Good Old Neon" in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002
• John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1997–2002
• Lannan Foundation Residency Fellow, July–August 2000
• Named to Usage Panel, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th Edition et seq., 1999
• Inclusion of "The Depressed Person" in Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards
• Illinois State University, Outstanding University Researcher, 1998 and 1999
• Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for the story "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men #6", 1997
• Time magazine's Best Books of the Year (Fiction), 1996
• Salon Book Award (Fiction), 1996
• Lannan Literary Award (Fiction), 1996
• Inclusion of "Here and There" in Prize Stories 1989: The O. Henry Awards
• Whiting Award, 1987

Sources

See also: David Foster Wallace bibliography: Works about David Foster Wallace

• Boswell, Marshall and Burn, Stephen, eds. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century). ISBN 9781137078346

External links

Biographical

• David Foster Wallace Archive, The University of Texas at Austin
• "An Appraisal: Writer Mapped the Mythic and the Mundane", by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, September 14, 2008.
• "David Foster Wallace, 1962–2008", by David Gates, Newsweek, September 14, 2008.
• "The Unfinished" by D. T. Max, The New Yorker, March 9, 2009.
• "Everything & More: The Work of David Foster Wallace" by Malcolm Knox, The Monthly, November, 2008.
• "David Foster Wallace and the Velveteen Rabbit", Identity Theory, August 2011.
• "King of the Ghosts", n+1, October, 2011.
• Whiting Foundation Profile

Interviews

• David Foster Wallace Interview - Chris Lydon's radio show, three weeks after the publication of "Infinite Jest," Christopher Lydon interviews David Foster Wallace on February 21, 1996.
• David Wiley interviews David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, The Minnesota Daily's A&E Magazine, February 27, 1997.
• Charlie Rose interviews David Foster Wallace following the publication of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again on YouTube, March 27, 1997.
• Charlie Rose Show: "David Foster Wallace: The future of fiction in the information age" on YouTube, Charlie Rose Show, May 17, 1996.
• David Foster Wallace Interview - Lewis Burke Frumkes’ Radio Show
• This American Life Episode 160 broadcast May 19, 2000 "Character Assassination" Act 2 'Sonny Takes a Fall' – (19-minute radio program segment in which David Foster Wallace "reports on a turning point in 2000's Presidential primaries: the moment when John McCain failed to respond well to an attack by George Bush". Description of broadcast from thislife.org)
• "David Foster Wallace: A Profile" (by Bill Katovsky)
• Bookworm Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt: April 1996, May 1997, August 1999, August 2000, March 2006, November 2008
• David Foster Wallace on Whad'Ya Know? April 1997

Speeches

• Kenyon College 2005 commencement address - audio & text
• Kenyon College 2005 commencement address - text

Portals

• THE HOWLING FANTODS! – David Foster Wallace: News, Info, Links
• Infinite Jest Wiki
• David Foster Wallace AUDIO PROJECT