David Foster Wallace Biography Quotes 26 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
David Foster Wallace was born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York, to James Donald Wallace, a philosopher, and Sally Foster Wallace, an English teacher known for her exacting approach to grammar and usage. Soon after his birth the family settled in the Champaign-Urbana area of Illinois, where his father taught at the University of Illinois and his mother taught at Parkland College. He grew up alongside his younger sister, Amy Wallace (later Amy Wallace-Havens), in a house where books, logic, and language were part of daily life. The formality and play of words that suffused his upbringing would later shape both his fiction and essays. As a teenager he was a serious tennis player, a discipline that fortified his fascination with the mental architectures of performance and failure; years later, he would turn that experience into essays that treated sport as a window onto attention, grace, and obsession.

Education and First Books
Wallace studied at Amherst College, where he double-majored in English and philosophy. He was drawn to analytic problems and to the thickets of logic and language, producing a philosophy thesis that engaged with Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism and an English thesis that became the backbone of his first novel. The English project, revised and retitled The Broom of the System, was published in 1987 and immediately marked him as a distinctive voice: comic, formally playful, and preoccupied with how language structures reality. After Amherst he studied in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, refining a style that combined erudition with a hunger to render the textures of contemporary life.

In 1989 he published Girl with Curious Hair, a collection of short stories that ranged from deadpan to delirious, gesturing toward a project that would occupy him for the next several years: how to write fiction that is technically adventurous yet emotionally sincere. Around this time he collaborated with his Amherst friend and former roommate Mark Costello on Signifying Rappers, a book-length meditation on hip-hop, media, and American culture. Even in this early nonfiction, Wallace sought to understand the moral pressures exerted by entertainment, irony, and mass attention.

Breakthrough and Infinite Jest
The 1996 publication of Infinite Jest established Wallace as one of the most ambitious American novelists of his generation. Shepherded by his longtime agent Bonnie Nadell and edited by Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, the novel sprawls across more than a thousand pages and famously deploys endnotes as an integral narrative device. It maps a near-future North America while scrutinizing addiction, competition, family, and the seductions of entertainment. Don DeLillo was a touchstone for Wallace's sense of cultural systems and paranoia, and Wallace's friendship with Jonathan Franzen became a crucial source of support and debate as both writers navigated what it meant to do serious fiction in a commercial culture. Infinite Jest was a critical and cultural phenomenon; readers formed communities around its puzzles and pleasures, and the book secured Wallace a 1997 MacArthur Fellowship. The novel's scale and demands also defined the expectations that followed him, artistically and personally.

Essays, Journalism, and Style
While working on fiction, Wallace built a second, highly influential career as an essayist and journalist. Assignments for Harper's, Rolling Stone, Gourmet, and other magazines showcased his signature moves: footnoted digressions, a frank accounting of his own complicities, and a moral seriousness about the everyday. "Shipping Out", his report on a luxury cruise later collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), dissected the machinery of pleasure with both empathy and alarm. "Authority and American Usage", framed as a review of a usage dictionary, revealed his lifelong debt to his mother's classroom and his belief that choices in grammar are choices in ethics. "Host", about talk radio, used diagrams and boxes to map argument and affect in public discourse. His enthusiasm for mathematics and logic yielded Everything and More (2003), a challenging and idiosyncratic book about infinity and Georg Cantor. In Consider the Lobster (2005), Wallace used a food festival essay to pose blunt questions about suffering, taste, and moral attention. He also wrote tenderly about sport, culminating in "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" (2006), where his feel for athletic grace became a meditation on the limits of language and the possibility of transcendence.

Teaching and Mentorship
Wallace spent much of his professional life teaching. At Illinois State University in Normal, where he taught throughout the 1990s, he became a demanding and generous mentor, urging students toward clarity, humility, and rigor. He later joined Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 2002, where small workshops and office hours became spaces for his meticulous, compassionate editing. Former students often recalled his handwritten notes, his openness about the labor of writing, and his insistence that literature could still be a site of genuine connection in a culture soaked in irony.

Personal Life
The people closest to Wallace helped shape both his life and work. In the mid-1990s he had a significant relationship with the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, whose example and candor about recovery and truth-telling left a mark on his ethics of nonfiction. He married the artist Karen Green in 2004; their life together in California offered stability and companionship during the years he concentrated on teaching and on a new, difficult novel. Beyond romantic relationships, friendships in the literary world mattered to him intensely. Jonathan Franzen became one of his closest friends, a natural interlocutor for intellectual and artistic worries; their correspondence and public remarks reveal a bond marked by mutual admiration, occasional disagreement, and deep concern. Editors and gatekeepers were crucial allies: Bonnie Nadell advocated for him from the beginning, and Michael Pietsch's editorial partnership helped shape Infinite Jest and later guided a posthumous project to completion.

Struggles with Mental Health
Wallace lived for decades with major depression and periods of severe anxiety, conditions he discussed guardedly but which those close to him understood as a constant backdrop to his work. Treatment over the years included therapy and medication; a long course of the antidepressant phenelzine (Nardil) helped him substantially, though its side effects were difficult. Efforts to change this regimen in the mid-2000s led to destabilization, hospitalizations, and experimental treatments as he searched for relief. Friends and family, including Karen Green and his sister Amy, supported him through relapses while he continued to teach and to write.

Later Work and The Pale King
After the story collection Oblivion (2004), Wallace focused on an ambitious novel about boredom, duty, and the moral dimensions of attention, set largely inside an Internal Revenue Service processing center in the Midwest. He researched tax code, interviewed employees, and built a massive body of drafts and notes. The project, eventually titled The Pale King, grew in fragments and episodes, reflecting his interest in consciousness under routine and in the possibility that meaning may reside in patience and care rather than in spectacle. Alongside this work he delivered the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, later known as "This Is Water", a direct and widely cherished statement of his belief that freedom begins with choosing how and what to pay attention to in ordinary life.

Death
On September 12, 2008, in Claremont, California, Wallace died by suicide at the age of 46. The loss reverberated through his family and friends and through a wide community of readers and writers. Karen Green, his parents James and Sally, and his sister Amy were central presences in the immediate aftermath, as were close literary friends like Jonathan Franzen. The shock also reopened public conversations about the relationship between art and suffering, and about how to care for people whose illnesses are not always visible.

Posthumous Publications and Legacy
After his death, Michael Pietsch assembled The Pale King (2011) from the drafts, files, and notes Wallace left behind, shaping a novel that, though unfinished, deepened his exploration of attention, tedium, and ethics. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Subsequent volumes, including Both Flesh and Not (2012), The David Foster Wallace Reader (2014), and collections of his sports writing such as String Theory (2016), broadened the view of his pursuits and methods. Biographical accounts, notably D. T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, drew on interviews with Karen Green, Bonnie Nadell, and other intimates to record the textures of his life.

Wallace's influence can be traced in how younger writers approach voice, footnotes, and the balance of erudition with vulnerability. Yet what most readers and former students recall are his commitments: to the idea that fiction can make us less lonely; to a prose that refuses to condescend to complexity; and to the moral imperative, voiced again and again in his essays and teaching, to pay attention. The people who stood closest to him, his parents James and Sally, his sister Amy, his wife Karen Green, advocates like Bonnie Nadell, editors like Michael Pietsch, interlocutors like Jonathan Franzen, and models like Don DeLillo, helped make possible a body of work that continues to challenge and console. Even as the public image of David Foster Wallace has sometimes hardened into myth, the record of his life shows a writer working painstakingly, among others and for others, at the task of telling the truth about how difficult, and how worth it, it is to be a person.

Our collection contains 26 quotes who is written by David, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Writing - Live in the Moment.

Other people realated to David: Thomas Pynchon (Writer), Jesse Eisenberg (Actor), William Gaddis (Novelist), Lewis H. Lapham (Editor)

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