David Foster Wallace

• 1. Introduction

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  David Foster Wallace wrote a novel that Time magazine placed among the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. That book was Infinite Jest, and it reached readers in 1996. Years later, the critic 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 worked in novels, short stories and essays, and he also spent much of his life teaching. His books are crowded with invented vocabulary, mathematical ideas and notes that sprawl across the page. Behind that dense surface sits a simple question about how a person can stay honest and attentive in a loud, distracting world. What shaped a mind like his? Why did he distrust a style that most of his fellow writers admired? What was the point of all those notes? And what happened to his work once he was no longer there to guard it?

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• 2. A Philosopher's Son

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  Ithaca, New York, is where David Foster Wallace was born on the 21st of February 1962. His parents were Sally Jean Wallace, whose maiden name was Foster, and James Donald Wallace. The family settled in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he grew up beside his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens. Both parents taught. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His mother taught English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, and in 1996 the college named her its Professor of the Year. From fourth grade onward the family lived in Urbana, and Wallace moved through Yankee Ridge Elementary School, Brookens Junior High School and Urbana High School.

  As a teenager, Wallace ranked among the better junior tennis players in his region. He later wrote about those years in an essay called "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley." Harper's Magazine first ran it under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes." Religion pulled at him in a different way. His parents were atheists, yet Wallace twice tried to join the Catholic Church. By his own account he "flunked the period of inquiry." Later he attended a Mennonite church.

  Amherst College, where his father had also studied, took him next. Wallace majored in English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude in 1985. He sang in the glee club, and his sister remembers that he "had a lovely singing voice." In philosophy he pursued modal logic and mathematics. His senior thesis in that field won the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. It appeared in print only after his death, as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, in 2010.

  His English honors thesis led somewhere else entirely. Wallace reworked it into the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System, and from then on he committed himself to writing. He explained the choice to the interviewer David Lipsky: "Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." In 1987 he finished a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona. He then returned to Massachusetts to study philosophy at Harvard University, but he soon left that program. The novel he had started at Amherst was already heading for publication.

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• 3. Against Irony

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  In 1990 Wallace wrote an essay called "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," which saw print in 1993. Its target was a habit of mind he thought television had planted in American writers. He wrote of the "television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat." Irony and ridicule, he conceded, were entertaining and effective. In the same breath he called them "agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture." For a young fiction writer, he argued, they created terrifically vexing problems.

  That argument shaped his whole approach to writing. Wallace wanted to move past the irony and metafiction that marked postmodern art, toward what critics have called a post-postmodern or metamodern style. He did not abandon irony altogether. He used many varieties of it. But his characters tend to long for plain, unguarded experience and communication, even while a media-saturated society makes those things hard to reach.

  The biographer D. T. Max described the result as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded." Wallace often gave a single work several protagonists and several settings. His pages return to certain themes. One is the fragmentation of thought. Another is the odd relationship between happiness and boredom. A third is the tension between the beauty and the hideousness of the human body. Wallace summed up his ambition as "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help the reader "become less alone inside."

  In 2005 he carried those convictions to a podium at Kenyon College, where he gave the commencement address. Wallace described ordinary life as a run of daily crises and chronic disillusionment. He warned graduates against solipsism and pointed them toward compassion and mindfulness. In his words, "The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it." He added that real freedom involves attention, awareness, discipline and effort, and "being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over." The speech came out as a book titled This Is Water in 2009. In May 2013, portions of it fed a popular online video of the same name.

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• 4. Footnotes and Endnotes

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  In a 1997 interview on Charlie Rose, Wallace was asked about the notes that crowd his books. He answered that they broke up the straight line of the narrative. They also mirrored the way he experienced reality, without scrambling the structure of the story. He joked that he could have jumbled the sentences themselves, "but then no one would read it." The notes became a signature. They fill Infinite Jest and the story "Octet," which is collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and they run through most of his nonfiction after 1996.

  The rest of his prose is just as unusual. Wallace blended narrative modes and authorial voices. He used jargon and coined vocabulary, including self-made abbreviations and acronyms. His sentences could run through many clauses. Philosophical and mathematical references turn up all over his writing.

  The path to that style began with The Broom of the System, which won national attention and warm reviews. In The New York Times, Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza." She set it in a line with Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V. and John Irving's World According to Garp. A story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, followed in 1989.

  Teaching ran alongside the writing. In 1991 Wallace started as an adjunct professor of literature at Emerson College in Boston. The next year his colleague and supporter Steven Moore suggested he apply to Illinois State University, and Wallace won a place in its English department. That same year, 1991, he began Infinite Jest. He sent a draft to his editor, Michael Pietsch, in December 1993, and excerpts appeared in magazines throughout 1995 before the full book came out.

  Honors soon arrived. In 1997 Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship. The editors of The Paris Review also gave him the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for a story that the magazine had published, later collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The collection itself appeared in 1999, and Oblivion: Stories followed in 2004. Bonnie Nadell served as his literary agent for his entire career.

  In 2002 he moved to Claremont, California, as the first Roy E. Disney-endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses each semester and kept most of his energy for his own work. His short fiction appeared in a long list of periodicals, from The New Yorker and Playboy to the small journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

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• 5. Assignments

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  When Rolling Stone needed someone to follow Senator John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000, it sent Wallace. The magazine also had him cover the September 11 attacks. Other editors gave him stranger errands. Harper's Magazine sent him to cruise ships, state fairs and tornadoes, and the cruise piece became the title essay of his first nonfiction book. Tennis magazine asked him to cover the US Open, and The New York Times asked him to write about Roger Federer. Premiere magazine wanted the director David Lynch and the pornography industry. Esquire assigned him the tennis player Michael Joyce, and Waterstone's magazine asked about the movie-special-effects industry. For The Atlantic he profiled the conservative talk radio host John Ziegler, and Gourmet magazine sent him to a lobster festival in Maine.

  He was a prolific reviewer as well, covering books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In its November 2007 issue, marking the magazine's 150th anniversary, The Atlantic invited a range of authors, artists and politicians to write short pieces on the future of the American idea. Wallace was one of them.

  Not everyone trusted what he reported. Fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen has said he believes Wallace invented dialogue and incidents, adding that "those things didn't actually happen." The writer John Cook looked at the essays "Shipping Out" and "Ticket to the Fair." In them, he observed, Wallace meets pitch-perfect characters who deliver comedically crystalline lines and drop him into absurd situations. Cook used both pieces when teaching journalism, as examples of "the inescapable temptation to shave, embellish, and invent narratives."

  The essays were gathered in three books. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again came out in 1997, and Consider the Lobster followed in 2005. The third, Both Flesh and Not, appeared in 2012, after his death, and it includes his first published essay, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young." In 2016 a fourth volume gathered his tennis writing under the title String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis.

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• 6. The Long Illness

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  In 1989 Wallace spent four weeks at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, a psychiatric institute affiliated with Harvard Medical School. There he completed a detoxification program for drugs and alcohol. He later said the stay changed his life. Over the years he struggled with depression, alcoholism, drug addiction and suicidal thoughts, and he was hospitalized for psychiatric care more than once. In 2008 his father said Wallace had lived with major depressive disorder for more than two decades. Antidepressant medication, his father added, had made it possible for him to work.

  In the early 1990s Wallace dated the writer Mary Karr. In 2012 she described his behavior toward her as obsessive and volatile. She alleged that he once threw a coffee table at her and once forced her out of a car, leaving her to walk home. In 2018 Karr said the account of his alleged abuse in D. T. Max's biography was "about 2% of what happened." She made further allegations, including that he kicked her and tried to buy a gun. In 2015 she had said he was violent toward other women he dated. Three years later she said several women, among them former students, had contacted her with accounts of physical and emotional abuse.

  In 2002 Wallace met the painter Karen L. Green, and they married on the 27th of December 2004. He also loved dogs and talked about opening a shelter for strays. Jonathan Franzen recalled that Wallace favored dogs who had been abused and were unlikely to find patient owners elsewhere.

  June 2007 brought a physical illness with severe stomach pains. His doctors thought one of his medications had reacted badly with food from a restaurant. On their advice, and because he worried the drug was interfering with his writing, he stopped taking Nardil, also known as phenelzine, his main antidepressant. His depression returned. He tried other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. In time he went back to phenelzine, but it no longer helped, and major depressive symptoms remained.

  Wallace died by suicide on the 12th of September 2008, at age 46, at the house in Claremont where he lived with his wife. He left a note for her. Before he died, he had also arranged part of the manuscript of the unfinished novel he was writing.

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• 7. Afterlives

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  On the 23rd of October 2008, mourners gathered at New York University to remember Wallace. Memorial gatherings had already taken place at Pomona College, Amherst College, the University of Arizona and Illinois State University. At NYU the speakers included his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. Gerry Howard, editor of his first two books, spoke, as did Colin Harrison of Harper's Magazine, Michael Pietsch and Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Fellow writers Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim and Jonathan Franzen also paid tribute.

  In March 2009 the publisher Little, Brown and Company announced that it would release the manuscript he had left unfinished. The novel was called The Pale King. Pietsch assembled it from the pages and notes Wallace left behind, and several excerpts ran in The New Yorker and other magazines. It reached bookstores on the 15th of April 2011 to generally positive reviews. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that it "showcases Wallace's embrace of discontinuity." She noted his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, and his interest in America's obsession with self-gratification and entertainment. The book was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  His papers found a home in March 2010, when the University of Texas at Austin bought his archive. It holds drafts of books, stories, essays and poems, along with letters, research and the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest. All of it sits at the Harry Ransom Center.

  Scholarship has grown around him. Loyola University New Orleans has offered English seminars on his work since 2011, and Harvard University has taught similar courses. Illinois State University hosted the first David Foster Wallace Conference in May 2014, and a second one followed in May 2015. In January 2017 the International David Foster Wallace Society and the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies were launched.

  A long roster of writers credit him as an influence, among them Dave Eggers, Rivka Galchen, John Green, Porochista Khakpour, Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Charles Yu. Others on the list are Matthew Gallaway, David Gordon, Darin Strauss, Deb Olin Unferth and Michael Schur. George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen, who spoke at his NYU memorial, appear there too. One name on that list, Michael Schur, took the admiration further and put it on screen.

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• 8. Screen and Stage

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  Michael Schur, the co-creator of Parks and Recreation, is a noted fan of Infinite Jest, and a Season 5 episode of the NBC series called "Partridge" refers to the novel repeatedly. Schur also directed the music video for The Decemberists' song "Calamity Song," which shows the Eschaton game from the book.

  Film came to Wallace's work in 2009. John Krasinski directed an adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men with an ensemble cast, and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2012 The Simpsons aired "A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again," the 19th episode of its 23rd season. It is loosely based on his essay "Shipping Out," and Wallace himself appears in the background of a ship's dining room, wearing a tuxedo T-shirt. The 2015 film The End of the Tour grew out of conversations David Lipsky recorded with Wallace, published in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Jason Segel played Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg played Lipsky. The film won an Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival, and Segel earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Male Lead.

  Theater got there first. In August 2000 Dylan McCullough staged twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as Hideous Men at the New York International Fringe Festival. It was the first stage adaptation of Wallace's work. Director Marc Caellas later made Brief Interviews with Hideous Writers, which premiered in Buenos Aires on the 4th of November 2011. In 2012 the artist Andy Holden adapted the book for a two-night run at the ICA in London. Needtheater, a Los Angeles company, brought "Good Old Neon" from Oblivion: Stories to the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival, performed by Ian Forester. Germany's Hebbel am Ufer put Infinite Jest on stage once, in various spots around Berlin, with the action unfolding over a single 24 hours.

  Music has drawn on him as well. Composer Eric Moe turned the story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" into a 50-minute operatic piece with video projections. The 1975 titled a song "Surrounded by Heads and Bodies" after the opening line of Infinite Jest, on the album A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. Singer Matty Healy told Pitchfork he read the novel in rehab, alone with his nurses, with the book open on its first page. He added: "nobody reads Infinite Jest all the way! Everyone our age has got a battered, quarter-read copy of Infinite Jest." That battered copy, opened to the first page and left on a bedside table, may be the book's most honest portrait.

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