David Foster Wallace Biography

David Foster Wallace	Born: 1962-02-21 Birthplace: Ithaca, NY Died: 2008-09-12 Location of Death: Claremont, CA Cause of Death: Suicide Race: White Field: Novelist, Essayist Famous for: Infinite Jest
Field: Novelist

David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. James Wallace had recently finished his Ph.D. at Cornell University; the family soon relocated to central Illinois, where James found work as a philosophy instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962. Sally attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and eventually became a professor of English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, where she won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996. Wallace's younger sister, Amy, has practiced law in Arizona since 2005.

As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and double-majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize,[1] and he graduated summa cum laude in 1985. He next pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he earned in 1987.

Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System, garnered significant national attention and critical praise. Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard. He later abandoned them.

In 1992, at the behest of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace applied for and won 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.

Wallace received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 1997. In 1997, Wallace was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews — "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6" — which had appeared in the magazine. In 2002, he moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester, and focused on his writing.

On September 12, 2008, Wallace's wife called the Claremont, California, police at 9:30 p.m., saying that she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.