David Foster Wallace

Born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York, and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, David Foster Wallace was the son of a philosophy professor and an English teacher who had won a national grammar contest. He was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, and the geometry of Midwestern flatness and competitive pressure never left his fiction. At Amherst College he wrote two senior theses, one in philosophy on modal logic and one in English that became his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987). His second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), ran to 1,079 pages with 388 endnotes and attempted to capture the full catastrophe of American entertainment, addiction, and loneliness. It made him the most talked-about writer of his generation. His nonfiction, collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005), displayed a mind that could make a cruise ship or a state fair or a lobster festival into an occasion for moral philosophy. He taught creative writing at Illinois State and then at Pomona College. He struggled with severe depression for most of his adult life, managed for twenty years by the drug Nardil. When the medication stopped working and alternatives failed, he hanged himself on September 12, 2008, at forty-six. The Pale King, his unfinished novel about boredom and the IRS, was published posthumously in 2011.

In May 2005 Wallace stood before Kenyon College's graduating class and opened with a parable: two young fish meet an older fish, who asks, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' One young fish eventually turns to the other and asks, 'What the hell is water?' The speech was published in 2009 as This Is Water.