| David Foster Wallace | |
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| David Foster Wallace at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, January 2006. | |
| Born | February 21, 1962 Ithaca, New York |
| Died | September 12, 2008 (aged 46) Claremont, California |
| Occupation | novelist, short story writer, essayist, college professor |
| Nationality | United States |
| Period | 1987–2008 |
| Genres | Literary fiction |
| Literary movement | Postmodern literature, hysterical realism |
| Notable work(s) | Infinite Jest |
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David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest,[2][3] which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006).[4]
Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."
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Biography
Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis[5] player. He was "a rare combination of sporting and academic prowess. His was an omnivorous brain, able to ingest complex mathematics, logic and philosophy. Wallace was so uncomfortable among strangers that his shyness was its own defensive barrier."
He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic, titled Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality (described in James Ryerson's 2008 New York Times essay "Consider the Philosopher"[6]) was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize.[7] His other senior thesis, in English, would later become his first novel.[8] Wallace graduated with summa cum laude honors for both theses in 1985, and in 1987 received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona.
Family
Wallace's father, James Wallace, having finished his graduate course work in philosophy at Cornell University, accepted a teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 1962. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1963. His mother, Sally Foster Wallace, attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and 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. She used to fake coughing fits if her children uttered a solecism at dinner, stopping only when they figured out the error and corrected it. Wallace wrote that he was "slightly chilled by the idea of children being brought up to think that a linguistic error might deprive their mother of oxygen."[5] David's younger sister, Amy Wallace Havens of Tucson, Arizona, has practiced law since 2005.
In the early 1990s, Wallace had a relationship with the poet and memoirist Mary Karr (The Liars' Club). Wallace married painter Karen L. Green on December 27, 2004.[9][10] Dogs played an important role in Wallace's life;[11] he was very close to his two dogs, Bella and Warner,[10][11] and according to Jonathan Franzen "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them."[10] had spoken of opening a dog shelter,
Death
Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself on September 12, 2008,[2][3][9][12] as confirmed by the October 27, 2008 autopsy report.[13]
In an interview with The New York Times, Wallace's father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive.[9] When he experienced severe side effects from the medication, Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant, phenelzine.[10] On his doctor's advice, Wallace stopped taking the medication in June 2007,[9] and the depression returned. Wallace received other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. When he returned to phenelzine, he found it had lost its effectiveness.[10] In the months before his death, his depression became severe.[9]
Numerous gatherings were held to honor Wallace after his death, including memorial services at Pomona College, Amherst College, University of Arizona, and on October 23, 2008, at NYU—the latter with speakers including his sister, Amy Wallace Havens; his agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, the editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, editor at Harper's Magazine; Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest and Wallace's later work; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker; as well as authors Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.[14]
Career
Wallace's first novel, 1987's The Broom of the System, 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."[15] Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts, for graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but soon abandoned it. In 1991 he began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston.
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 published short fiction in Might, GQ, Playboy, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Mid-American Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, Open City, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The New Yorker, and Science.
In 1997, Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, awarded 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 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.
Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent during his entire career.[16] Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest.[17]
In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish the manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, that Wallace was working on at the time of his death.[18] An excerpt from the novel was published in the March 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.[19][20]
In March 2010, it was announced that Wallace's personal papers and archives – drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest – had been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin and will reside at the University's Harry Ransom Center.[21][22][23][24][25][26][27]
Themes and styles
Wallace's fiction is often concerned with irony. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction",[28] originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, proposes that television has an ironic influence on fiction writing, and urges literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: "I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems". Wallace used many forms of irony, but focused on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.[29]
Wallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. His writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes—often nearly as expansive as the text proper. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in "Octet" as well as in the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, "but then no one would read it."[30]
According to Wallace, "fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being," and he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside."[31] In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, he describes the human condition of daily crises and chronic disillusionment and rejects solipsism,[32] invoking compassion, mindfulness, and existentialism:[33]
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.
Nonfiction work
Wallace covered Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign[34] and had been commissioned shortly before his death to write a story about Barack Obama.[35] He wrote about the September 11 attacks for Rolling Stone; cruise ships (in what became the title essay of his first nonfiction book), state fairs, and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine; the US OpenTENNIS Magazine; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Premiere magazine; the tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire; the special-effects film industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic Monthly;[36] and a Maine lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He also reviewed books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, Wallace was among the authors, artists, politicians and others who wrote short pieces on "the future of the American idea." tournament for
Other media
Twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men were adapted into a stage play in 2000, the first theatrical adaptation of Wallace's work. The play, Hideous Men, adapted and directed by Dylan McCullough, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2000.
A filmed adaptation of Brief Interviews, directed by John Krasinski, was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[37] The film stars Julianne Nicholson and an ensemble cast including Christopher Meloni, Rashida Jones, Timothy Hutton, Josh Charles and Will Forte.[38]
The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men[39] The piece was described as having "subversively inscribed classical music into pop culture", but received tepid reviews overall.[40] was adapted by composer Eric Moe into a 50-minute operatic piece, to be performed with accompanying video projections.
Awards
- 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 Edition 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[41]
- Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 1997
- Time magazine's Best Books of the Year (Fiction), 1996
- Salon Book Award (Fiction), 1996
- Lannan Literary Award (Fiction), 1996
- Whiting Writers' Award, 1987
Novels
- The Broom of the System (1987)
- Infinite Jest (1996)
- The Pale King (2011) (unfinished)
- Short story collections
- Girl with Curious Hair (1989) (published in Europe as Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
- Oblivion: Stories (2004)
Nonfiction
- Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990), coauthored with Mark Costello
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (essays) (1997)
- Up, Simba! (2000)
- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
- Consider the Lobster (essays) (2005)
- McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (paperback reprint of Up, Simba!) (2008)
- This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (a commencement speech given at Kenyon College in 2005) (2009)
- Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (an adaptation of Wallace's undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Amherst, "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality.") (2011)
Contributor
- Fiction International 19:2 (Aids Art, Photomontages from Germany and England) (1991), contributing author
- Grand Street 42 (1992), contributor
- Grand Street 46 (1993), contributor
- The Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Future of Fiction, A Forum Edited by David Foster Wallace (1996), editor
- Open City Number Five : Change or Die (1997), contributing author
- The Best American Essays 2007 (2007), guest editor
- The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007), contributing author
- The Mechanics' Institute Review, Issue 4 (September 2007)
