David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca New York in 1962 and raised in Illinois where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel The Broom of the System as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel Infinite Jest was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College Illinois State University and Pomona College and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Oblivion the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writers' Award and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel The Pale King was published in 2011.