| David Foster Wallace |
Article Index for David |
Website Links For David Foster |
Information AboutDavid Foster Wallace |
|
BIOGRAPHY David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. James had recently finished his Ph.D. at Cornell; 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. He won a professorial appointment within a year and became tenured in 1968. 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. His younger sister, Amy, has practiced law in Arizona since 2005. As an adolescent, Wallace was athletic, and was regionally ranked as a junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College , and majored in philosophy, with a focus on logic and mathematics. He graduated in 1985 , summa cum laude, and next pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University Of Arizona , which he earned in 1987. His first novel, '' The Broom Of The System '', was published at the same time, and it garnered significant national attention and critical praise. Wallace moved to Boston to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, but 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 a longer novel in 1991, and devoted much of his time to completing it: he submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After excerpts from the novel were published through 1995, Wallace finally published it as '' Infinite Jest '' in 1996, and this sealed his reputation as a brilliant writer with a unique perspective on American culture. Wallace moved to California in 2002, as the first Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College . He teaches one or two undergraduate courses per semester, and focuses on his writing. CAREER Wallace's first novel, '' The Broom Of The System '' (1987) was published while he was still a graduate student. He received the MacArthur Foundation "genius Grant" in 1997, after the publication of his second novel, ''Infinite Jest''. An important component of Wallace's influence in U.S. fiction is a concern with what he considers the prevalent contemporary mode of '' in 1993, pointed out the often corrosively ironic effect of television's influence on fiction writing, and urged literary authors to avoid irony's many pitfalls. Wallace follows his own advice: at times his writing is admirably direct and emotionally powerful, as in many sequences of ''Infinite Jest''. In its drive to sincerity, his work often seems to attempt to locate the basis for authentic experience in a world or mode of consciousness that seems to conspire against his efforts to do so. Wallace's novels are sprawling and ambitious; they often meld writing in various modes, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes quasi-invented) from a wide variety of fields. He is well-known for his use of obscure vocabulary; one review commented on his use of the word Styptic . His shorter fiction is frequently more aggressively experimental, and has sometimes taken the problem of the authenticity of the authorial voice and the reflexivity of the project of writing to incredible lengths. This can be seen in the story "Octet" in his short story collection '' Brief Interviews With Hideous Men '', which carries the problem of the author/reader relationship to what might be called either parodic lengths or the limits of sanity, depending on the mood of the reader. Wallace has a unique prose style that contains many stylistic oddities, such as writing "w/r/t" for "with reference respect to" and abbreviating proper names. His most notable rhetorical move is the liberal use of lengthy explanatory footnotes, often nearly as expansive as the text proper; Wallace used footnotes extensively in ''Infinite Jest,'' "Octet," and the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. Wallace remains a prominent writer in the U.S. , and 9/11 for '' Rolling Stone ''; the U.S. Open tennis tournament for ''Tennis'' magazine; the director David Lynch and the Pornography industry for '' Premiere '' magazine; the special-effects film industry for ''Waterstone's'' magazine; conservative talk radio for The Atlantic ; and a lobster festival for '' Gourmet '' magazine. He has also reviewed books in several genres for the '' Los Angeles Times '', '' Washington Post '', '' The New York Times '', and '' Philadelphia Inquirer ''. In 2005 he gave the graduation speech at Kenyon College . BIBLIOGRAPHY Fiction
Nonfiction
On Wallace
Interviews
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|