David Foster Wallace

Epic card · No. 6940

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996). In 2008, David Ulin wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Wallace was "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace grew up in Illinois, and graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His Amherst honors thesis on philosophy and modal logic was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987). Wallace taught English and creative writing at Illinois State University, Emerson College, and Pomona College. As a writer of "post-postmodern" literature, Wallace intentionally avoided many tropes of postmodern art, including forms of irony and metafiction, asserting in 1990 that such tropes were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. He often wrote about tennis, which he played as a teenager...

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