Wallace, David Foster
Identification American author
Born February 21, 1962; Ithaca, New York
Died September 12, 2008; Claremont, California
Wallace is best known for the critically acclaimed publica-
tion of his 1996 epicInfinite Jest, a complicated, layered
parody of a future North America.
David Foster Wallace defined postmodern writing
for the 1990’s as he crafted difficult, hyperliterate,
sprawling, multicharacter novels and short stories
full of absurd and extreme situations. Characteristic
elements seen in Wallace’s writing include juxtaposi-
tions of linguistic styles, such as colloquialisms and
polysyllabic, esoteric language; textual elements
more common to other “nonliterary” modes of writ-
ing, such as acronyms and extensive footnotes; and
pervasive irony and satire. However, in all of Wal-
lace’s work, there lurks hope of redemption, ob-
scured as it may be.
Infinite Jest, published in 1996, uses all these ele-
ments to tell a story that intertwines a family, the
Incandenzas; a film titledInfinite Jest, which is so en-
grossing that viewers lose interest in everything ex-
cept repeatedly watching the film; a tennis academy;
and a halfway house, among other things. In a state-
ment against corporatism and globalization, the
novel’s future world depicts North America as a sin-
gle state, the Organization of North American Na-
tions (O.N.A.N.).
Corporations purchase naming rights to each cal-
endar year, with such years as “Year of the Trial-Size
Dove Bar.” By way of a criticism of industrialization,
the northeastern United States and southeastern
Canada have become a massive hazardous-waste-
dumping site known as “The Great Concavity”/“The
Great Convexity.” In the midst of all this,Infinite Jest
explores the desires that unite all humanity.
Wallace next published the short-story collection
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men(1999), a challenging,
fragmented text with such diverse subject matter as a
young boy perched atop the diving board at a local
pool; middle-aged men in uncomfortable sexual situa-
tions; and a certain desperate woman who narrates her
pathologies in the discourse of therapy-speak.
Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to two aca-
demics, Sally Foster Wallace and James Donald
Wallace. James became tenured in 1968 at the Uni-
versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Sally be-
came a professor of English at Parkland College in
Champaign. Wallace ranked as a junior tennis player
as an adolescent, a theme that surfaces inInfinite Jest
and others of his works. He attended Amherst Col-
lege, as his father did, where he double-majored in
English and philosophy and graduated in 1985,
summa cum laude; he then earned a master of fine
arts degree in creative writing from the University of
Arizona, which he finished in 1987, and secured a
position in the English Department at Illinois State
University in 1992. He was awarded a MacArthur
Foundation “genius grant” in 1997. Wallace relo-
cated to Claremont, California, in 2002 to become
the first Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Cre-
ative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona
College. He committed suicide on September 12,
2008, at the age of forty-six.The Nineties in America Wallace, David Foster 903
David Foster Wallace reads his work at the 2002New Yorker
Magazine Festival.(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)