David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was born on 21 February 1962 in Ithaca, New York, the son of James Donald Wallace, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and Sally Foster Wallace, an English teacher and accomplished grammarian who wrote the composition textbook Practically Painless English. The family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, when Wallace was young, and the flat, wind-scoured landscape of central Illinois — its cornfields, its interchanges, its fluorescent-lit institutions — became the psychic terrain of his fiction. He was a nationally ranked junior tennis player, a fact that would feed his lifelong obsession with the sport and produce some of his most brilliant nonfiction.

Life and Career

Wallace attended Amherst College, where he double-majored in English and philosophy. His senior thesis in English became his first novel; his senior thesis in philosophy, on modal logic and fatalism, earned him the department’s highest honours. He graduated summa cum laude in 1985 and entered the MFA programme at the University of Arizona, where he completed The Broom of the System (1987), a Wittgenstein-soaked, Pynchon-indebted debut that drew immediate attention. He was twenty-four.

The period between the debut and Infinite Jest was marked by severe depression, substance abuse, psychiatric hospitalization, and years of gruelling recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous and clinical treatment. These years — spent partly in a halfway house in Brighton, Massachusetts — transformed his writing. The cleverness of The Broom of the System gave way to something more urgent: a fiction that confronted loneliness, addiction, entertainment, and the failures of irony with an emotional directness that was unprecedented in postmodern American writing. He joined the creative writing faculty at Illinois State University in 1993.

Infinite Jest (1996) was published by Little, Brown and Company with 388 endnotes. At 1,079 pages, set in a near-future North America where the calendar years are subsidised by corporate sponsors and a lethal entertainment cartridge can render its viewers catatonic with pleasure, the novel braided three narratives — the Incandenza family and the Enfield Tennis Academy, the residents of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and a cell of Québécois separatist wheelchair assassins — into an encyclopaedic meditation on addiction, entertainment, and the possibility of sincere feeling in an ironic age. It became the literary event of the decade, selling modestly at first but building a passionate cult following that has only grown since Wallace’s death.

Wallace moved to Pomona College’s creative writing programme in 2002, where he taught until his death. He married the painter Karen Green in 2004. Despite periods of productivity — Oblivion (2004), his most accomplished story collection, and the major essays of Consider the Lobster (2005) — his depression worsened. In June 2007, on the advice of his psychiatrist, he attempted to wean himself from the antidepressant Nardil, which he had taken for over twenty years. The subsequent months were a catastrophe of failed alternative medications and returning suicidal depression. He hanged himself on 12 September 2008, at age forty-six.

Major Works and Themes

Wallace’s central preoccupation was the paradox of self-consciousness: how to live authentically, connect with others, and produce meaningful art in a culture that had made irony and self-awareness into default modes of existence. His fiction portrays characters trapped inside their own heads — addicts, depressives, obsessives, prodigies — who long for release from the prison of self but cannot find the exit.

The Broom of the System (1987) is a playful, talky debut about Lenore Beadsman, a switchboard operator in Cleveland whose great-grandmother, a student of Wittgenstein, has vanished from her nursing home. The novel explores the relationship between language and reality with a lightness that Wallace later judged superficial.

Girl with Curious Hair (1989) is a story collection that ranges from the pyrotechnics of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” — a novella-length metafictional assault on the legacy of John Barth — to the devastating realism of “Everything Is Green” and “Here and There.” It shows Wallace working out his relationship to postmodernism in real time.

Infinite Jest (1996) is the masterwork. Its subject is addiction in every form — to substances, to entertainment, to achievement, to self-image, to irony itself — and its deepest argument is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but genuine attention to other people. The novel resists summary because its structure is deliberately incomplete: the chronological endpoint precedes the opening, and critical plot events occur in the gap, requiring the reader to assemble the narrative. This formal choice embodies the novel’s theme: that meaning requires active effort, that passive consumption is a kind of death.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) collects the essays that established Wallace as the greatest nonfiction writer of his generation. The title essay, on a Caribbean luxury cruise, is a masterpiece of comic observation and existential dread. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” is his definitive critical statement on irony and postmodernism. “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” (on the Illinois State Fair) and the Roger Federer essay demonstrate his ability to transform any subject into a vehicle for philosophical inquiry.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) pushes the story form into experimental territory: interviews, monologues, pop quizzes, and fictions that examine masculinity, cruelty, and the performative nature of confession.

Oblivion (2004) is his darkest and most technically accomplished collection. Stories like “The Suffering Channel,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Mister Squishy” are claustrophobic descents into the American workplace, the advertising industry, and the impossible desire to know another consciousness from the inside.

The Pale King (2011), assembled posthumously by Michael Pietsch from hundreds of pages of draft material, is an unfinished novel about boredom, attention, and the IRS. Its best sections — particularly the Drinion chapters and the “Author’s Foreword” — suggest the novel would have been his most radical formal experiment.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Wallace’s reputation has undergone several phases. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he was the standard-bearer for a generation of ambitious literary writers; the phrase “post-postmodern” was coined partly to describe what he was doing. After his death, the canonisation was swift — perhaps too swift, as the revelations in Mary Karr’s accounts of their relationship and D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (2012) complicated the hagiographic narrative.

His influence on subsequent American fiction is pervasive. Writers as diverse as George Saunders, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Jennifer Egan have acknowledged him. His nonfiction style — the discursive footnotes, the obsessive qualification, the oscillation between high diction and slang — has been so widely imitated that it constitutes a recognisable (and sometimes tiresome) register in contemporary journalism.

The critical debate about Wallace centres on whether his work achieves the sincerity it advocates or merely performs sincerity as another layer of irony — whether “New Sincerity” is genuine or is itself a strategy. This is, of course, precisely the trap Wallace diagnosed.

Key Works

• The Broom of the System (1987)
• Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
• Signifying Rappers (1990, with Mark Costello)
• Infinite Jest (1996)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
• Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
• Oblivion: Stories (2004)
• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005)
• The Pale King (2011, posthumous)
• Both Flesh and Not: Essays (2012, posthumous)
• String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis (2016, posthumous)

Collecting Wallace

David Foster Wallace is the most collected literary fiction writer of his generation, and the market for his first editions has intensified dramatically since his death.

The Broom of the System (1987, Viking, New York) is his first novel and the foundation of any Wallace collection. The true first edition is in black cloth with a purple and white dust jacket designed by Neil Stuart. The print run was modest — roughly 5,000 copies — and fine first editions in the jacket now bring $2,000–$6,000. The advance review copy in printed wrappers is particularly scarce.

Infinite Jest (1996, Little, Brown and Company, New York) is the centrepiece. The first edition is a massive trade paperback with French flaps, published simultaneously with a smaller hardcover edition. The hardcover first edition, with its blue-sky-and-clouds dust jacket, had a print run estimated at 10,000–15,000 copies. Fine hardcover firsts bring $1,500–$5,000. The first paperback (with identical text and the same first printing identifier) is collectible at $200–$600 in clean condition. Signed copies of either format command significant premiums; Wallace did a substantial tour for the novel.

Girl with Curious Hair (1989, W.W. Norton) is scarce in fine condition with the jacket intact. First editions bring $800–$2,500.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997, Little, Brown) is his most popular nonfiction title. First editions in the jacket bring $300–$800.

Oblivion (2004, Little, Brown) and Consider the Lobster (2005, Little, Brown) are the later titles most in demand, at $200–$500 each in fine first edition condition.

The Pale King (2011, Little, Brown), published posthumously, is widely available but first printings are already appreciating, particularly signed advance copies that circulated before his death.

Wallace was a cooperative but not enthusiastic signer. He signed at readings and events throughout his career, and signed copies of most titles are available in the market. Inscribed copies with substantive content — Wallace was known for witty, sometimes elaborate inscriptions — are the prizes. Manuscripts, correspondence, and teaching materials are held primarily by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired his archive in 2010.