Fiction's about what it is to be a f*cking human being.
Note: Wallace possibly abused his girlfriend Mary Karr
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) is an author. A somewhat divisive author, Wallace is known for his novels Infinite Jest and The Pale King along with his essays and short stories.
Life[]
Born in Ithaca, New York in February of 1962 to the philosopher James D. Wallace and the English professor Sally Jean Foster Wallace, David's family moved to the Champaigna-Urbana Metropolitan Area (an area in the east-center of Illinois) while David was still young. David's father became a philosophy professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign while David's mother became an English professor at Parkland College. David was enrolled in various schools in the Metropolitan Area and became a tennis player in his youth (something he discussed in the essay Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley and which likely influenced his novel Infinite Jest).
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Writing style[]
Wallace's writing style is frequently described as postmodernist, though it is also somewhat frequently described as post-postmoderist or metamodernist. Metafiction is a staple of Wallace's works.
In his essay Infinite Jest, Twenty Years Later, Tom Bissell claims that David Foster Wallace was a nigh-unmatched wordsmith who changed the English language around him. He also claims that Wallace's prose actively "trains [the reader] to study the real world through the lens of his prose".
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Connections to other authors[]
Major influences on David Foster Wallace's novels include other postmodernist authors, most notably Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and John Barth. Wallace's literary "rivals" include John Updike (whom Wallace called "a penis with a thesaurus" in his review of Toward the End of Time and satirized in his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) and Bret Easton Ellis (whom he satirized in the short story Girl with Curious Hair).
While reviewing Girl with Curious Hair, critic Jennifer Levin described David Foster Wallace as: "A dynamic writer of extraordinary talent."
In a review of Infinite Jest for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described Wallace as "a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything, someone who can write funny, write sad, write serious, write satiric, a writer who's equally adept at the Pynchonesque epic and the Nicolson Bakeresque minute, a pushing-the-envelope postmodernist who's also able to create flesh-and-blood characters and genuinely moving scenes."
Two years after his death, Jennifer Egan based a short story in her linked short story collection/novel A Visit from the Goon Squad on David Foster Wallace's writing style.
Notable works[]
- The Broom of the System - Wallace's debut novel, a novel that looks three years into the future
- Girl with Curious Hair - Wallace's debut collection of short stories
- Little Expressionless Animals (printed in the Paris Review, 1988) - a short story about a Jeopardy! winner
- Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR - a short story set in a bland corporate world
- Girl with Curious Hair - a satire of Bret Easton Ellis and Young Republicans
- Lyndon (printed in Avatar, 1987) - a short story about Lyndon Baines Johnson
- John Billy (printed in Conjunctions:12, 1988) - a story written in an unusual vernacular prose style
- Here and There (printed in Fiction, 1987) - a dialogue
- My Appearance (or Late Night. Printed in Playboy, 1988) - a story based on a real-life David Letterman interview
- Say Never (printed in The Florida Review, 1987) - a story about a cheating poet
- Everything is Green (printed in Puerto del Sol, 1988) - a vignette
- Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way - a novella-length metafictional story based on John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse
- Signifying Rappers (with Mark Costello) - a book on rappers
- Infinite Jest - Wallace's best-known novel, which peers into the near future
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - Wallace's debut collection of essays
- Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley (printed in Harper's in December 1991)
- E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (printed in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993)
- Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All (printed in Harper's in 1994)
- Greatly Exaggerated (printed in the Harvard Book Review in 1992)
- David Lynch Keeps His Head (printed in Premiere in 1996)
- Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completenes (or The String Theory, printed in Esquire in 1996)
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (or Shipping Out, printed in Harper's in 1996)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - a collection of short stories
- A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life
- Death Is Not the End
- Forever Overhead
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)
- The Depressed Person
- The Devil Is a Busy Man
- Think
- Signifying Nothing
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Datum Centurio
- Octet
- Adult World
- The Devil Is a Busy Man
- Church Not Made with Hands
- Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko
- On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon
- Suicide as a Sort of Present
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)
- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity - a book on the history of infinity
- Oblivion - Wallace's final collection of short stories
- Mister Squishy (or Mr. Squishy, printed in McSweeney's #5 in 2000)
- The Soul is Not a Smithy (printed in AGNI #57 in 2003)
- Incarnations of Burned Children (printed in Esquire November 2000)
- Another Pioneer (printed in Colorado Review September 2001)
- Good Old Neon (printed in Conjunctions #37 in November 2001)
- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (or Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VIII), printed in McSweeney's #1 in 1998)
- Oblivion (printed in Black Clock #1 Spring/Summer 2004)
- The Suffering Channel
- Consider the Lobster - Wallace's final (prehumonous) collection of essays
- Big Red Son (or Neither Adult Nor Entertainment, originally published under the pseudonym Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet, printed in Premiere in September 1998)
- Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think (or John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?, printed in The New York Observer in October 12th 1997)
- Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed (or Laughing with Kafka, printed in Harper's in July 1998)
- Authority and American Usage (or Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage, printed in Harper's in April 2001)
- The View from Mrs. Thompson's (printed in Rolling Stone in October 25th 2001)
- How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (printed in The Philadelphia Inquirer in August 30th 1992)
- Up, Simba (or The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub and McCain's Promise, printed in Rolling Stone in April 2000)
- Consider the Lobster (printed in Gourmet in August 2004)
- Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky (or Feodor's Guide, printed in The Village Voice in April 9th 1996)
- Host (printed in The Atlantic in April 2005)
- Fate, Time, and Language - a posthumous essay
- The Pale King - a posthumous and unfinished novel
- Both Flesh and Not - a posthumous collection of essays
- Federer Both Flesh and Not (or Federer as Religious Experience, printed in The New York Times in 2006)
- Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young (printed in Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1998)
- The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein's Mistress (printed in Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1990)
- Mr. Cogito (printed in Spin in 1994)
- Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open (printed in Tennis in 1996)
- Back in New Fire (or Impediments to Passion, printed in Might in 1996)
- The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2 (or F/X Porn, printed in Waterstone's Magazine in 1998)
- The Nature of the Fun (printed in Fiction Writer in 1998)
- Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. novels >1960 (printed on Salon.com in 1999)
- Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (printed in Science in 2000)
- Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (printed in Rain Taxi in 2001)
- Twenty-Four Word Notes (printed in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus in 2004)
- Borges on the Couch (printed in the New York Times Book Review in 2004)
- Deciderization 2007—A Special Report - the introduction to The Best American Essays 2007
- Just Asking (printed in The Atlantic in 2007)
- The David Foster Wallace Reader - a collection of miscellaneous writings
- String Theory - a collection of Wallace's writings on tennis
- Something to Do with Paying Attention - a posthumous novella taken from material in The Pale King
Gallery[]
.png "The Pale King (David Foster Wallace).png (87 KB)")
See also[]
- Thomas Pynchon
- Nathan Hill
- Adam Levin
- Joshua Cohen
- Don DeLillo
- William Gaddis
- Jonathan Franzen
- Jonathan Safran Foer
- James Joyce
| Works of David Foster Wallace | ||
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Novels | ||