Daniel Wallace (author)

Daniel Wallace
Daniel Wallace at the 2008 Texas Book Festival.
Born	1959 (age 57–58) Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Occupation	writer
Nationality	American
Website
danielwallace.org

Daniel Wallace (born 1959) is an American author, best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, the basis for the Tim Burton film Big Fish and the Broadway musical of the same name. His other books include Ray in Reverse and The Watermelon King. His stories have also been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Wallace was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and he has three sisters. He attended Emory University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying English and philosophy. His first job was as a veterinary assistant cleaning cages. Wallace did not graduate from college until May 2008, instead taking a job with a trading company in Nagoya, Japan. He currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife and son.

Wallace states, of his childhood, that "I was completely average in every way. My childhood was the most uneventful part of my life, I think." He reports, however, that there was friction within his family, as in an interview he states:

"My father wanted me to work with him in his company, an import/export firm, and to that end I lived in Japan for a couple of years. But it didn’t work out. It didn’t make me happy and the truth is I wasn’t that good at it. I wouldn’t have been a good businessman. I tried. So I quit – or, if he were alive and you could ask him, fired – and started writing. He wasn’t for it but then it’s hard to support a child in an endeavor for which he has shown absolutely no promise. My mother loved the idea of it because being a writer is such a romantic idea and because it hurt my father, and if he was hurt she was happy."

After returning to Chapel Hill, Wallace worked for thirteen years in a bookstore and as an illustrator, where he designed greeting cards and refrigerator magnets. A running motif in his works are glass eyes; Wallace has stated in numerous interviews (including the one published in the back of the paperback edition of Big Fish) that he collects glass eyes. He continued to live in Chapel Hill with his wife, Laura, a social worker, and their son, Henry.