David Foster Wallace
| David Foster Wallace | |
|---|---|
Wallace in January 2006
|
|
| Born |
February 21, 1962 Ithaca, New York, U.S. |
| Died | September 12, 2008 (aged 46) Claremont, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, essayist, college professor |
| Alma mater |
Amherst College University of Arizona Harvard University |
| Period | 1987–2008 |
| Genre | Literary fiction, non-fiction |
| Literary movement | Postmodern literature, post-postmodernism, hysterical realism, New Sincerity |
| Notable works |
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David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest 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".
Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), 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.
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