David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was the child of two professors who grew up in Illinois. Like several of the characters in Infinite Jest, he was a competitive junior tennis player. He was a joint major in English and philosophy at Amherst College, and his senior honors thesis for English became his first novel, The Broom in the System, which was published in 1987, the same year he graduated from the MFA program in creative writing from the University of Arizona. That year he enrolled in the philosophy PhD program at Harvard, but soon dropped out. It was also around this time that Wallace began writing Infinite Jest. In 1989 he spent four months going through drug and alcohol detox at a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. He taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. In the early 1990s he became obsessed with the writer Mary Karr, stalking her and threatening to kill her husband. During the on/off relationship that ensued, he was physically violent. Wallace published Infinite Jest in 1996 and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship the following year. Throughout his career Wallace published short stories and nonfiction, including the now famous essays “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.” In addition to substance abuse issues, Wallace suffered from depression for almost all of his adult life, and in 2008 he killed himself. His final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011.