David Foster Wallace

At 46 years old, David Foster Wallace has this physical status:

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and university professor who specialized in English and creative writing.

Time magazine ranked Infinite Jest (1996) as one of the 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005.

In 2012, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Wallace was named "one of the most influential and inventive writers of the last ten years" by Los Angeles Times writer David Ulin.

Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Wurtzel, George Saunders, Rivka Galchen, John Green, Matthew Gallaway, Darin Strauss, Porochista Khakpour, and Deb Olin Unferth are among the writers who mention Wallace as an influence.

After suffering with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide at the age of 46.

Early life and education

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace (née Foster) and James Donald Wallace. The family and his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, were raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where they were raised together. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His mother, an English professor at Parkland College, a Champaign community college, who was given the "Professor of the Year" award in 1996. Wallace was born in Urbana, where he attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School, Brookens Junior High School, and Urbana High School.

Wallace, who adolescent, was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He wrote about this time in the book "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," first published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes." Wallace twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, but "flunk[ed] the time of inquiry," despite the fact that his parents were atheists. He later attended a Mennonite church.

Wallace attended Amherst College, his father's alma mater, where he majored in English and philosophy and graduated in 1985. He was involved in glee club among other extracurricular activities; his sister says he had a "loved singing voice." Wallace, Ph.D., wrote an essay on Free Will (2011), a philosophy and mathematics researcher who wrote a senior thesis in philosophy and modal logic for which was lauded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and later published as Fate, Time, and Language.

Wallace converted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first book, The Broom of the System (1987), and committed to being a writer. "Writing The Broom of the System I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, while philosophy was using 5 percent." Wallace earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987. He went to Boston to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but he left the program shortly.

Later life

Wallace was in a friendship with writer Mary Karr in the early 1990s. Wallace later described Wallace as obsessive about her, and said the pair was tumultuous, with Wallace once throwing a coffee table at her and then yelling her out of a car, prompting her to walk home. D. T. Max, Wallace's biographer, denied Wallace's abuse years later. "That's about 2% of what happened" on Max's account of their sex, she tweeted. Wallace, she said, escorted her upstairs at night, followed her 5-year-old son home from school. Several scholars and writers noted that Max's biography did not address the abuse but did not deny the allegations, which was later reiterated on Twitter.

Wallace met Karen L. Green, a painter who died on December 27, 2004, whom he married on December 27, 2004.

Wallace battled with depression, alcoholism, heroin use, and suicidal tendencies, and he was often hospitalized for psychiatric therapy. He spent four weeks at McLean Hospital, a Belmont, Massachusetts psychiatrist affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, where he successfully completed a drug and alcohol detox program. Later, he said that his time there changed his life.

Wallace talked about establishing a kennel rescue. According to Jonathan Franzen, he "had a predilection for dogs that had been neglected, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were patient enough for them."

Source

Awards and honors

• Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Pale King, 2012. No prize was awarded for the fiction category 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 Ed. 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