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Search - List of Books by David Foster Wallace
"This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside." -- David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 — September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923—2006).
Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."
Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."
Quotes more » « less
"Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.""For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.""I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.""I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.""I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.""It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.""It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.""It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.""Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.""One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.""Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.""Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.""The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.""The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.""The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.""The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?""The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.""This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.""This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.""This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.""To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.""TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.""We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?""We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.""What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it."
Biography more » « less
Personal
Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He was "a rare combination of sporting and academic prowess. His was an omnivorous brain, able to ingest complex mathematics, logic and philosophy. Wallace was so uncomfortable among strangers that his shyness was its own defensive barrier."He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic, titled Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality (described in James Ryerson's 2008 New York Times essay "Consider the Philosopher") was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. Our Alumni | Amherst College His other senior thesis, in English, would later become his first novel. Wallace graduated with summa cum laude honors for both theses in 1985, and in 1987 received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona.
Family
Wallace's father, James Wallace, having finished his graduate course work in philosophy at Cornell University, accepted a teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 1962. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1963. His mother, Sally Foster Wallace, attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and became a professor of English at Parkland College...a community college in Champaign...where she won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996. She used to fake coughing fits if her children uttered a solecism at dinner, stopping only when they figured out the error and corrected it. Wallace wrote that he was "slightly chilled by the idea of children being brought up to think that a linguistic error might deprive their mother of oxygen." David's younger sister, Amy Wallace Havens of Tucson, Arizona, has practiced law since 2005.In the early 1990s, Wallace had a relationship with the poet and memoirist Mary Karr (The Liars' Club). Wallace married painter Karen L. Green on December 27, 2004. Dogs played an important role in Wallace's life; he was very close to his two dogs, Bella and Warner, had spoken of opening a dog shelter, and according to Jonathan Franzen "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them."
Death
Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself on September 12, 2008, as confirmed by the October 27, 2008 autopsy report.In an interview with The New York Times, Wallace's father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. When he experienced severe side effects from the medication, Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant, phenelzine. On his doctor's advice, Wallace stopped taking the medication in June 2007, and the depression returned. Wallace received other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. When he returned to phenelzine, he found it had lost its effectiveness. In the months before his death, his depression became severe.
Numerous gatherings were held to honor Wallace after his death, including memorial services at Pomona College, Amherst College, University of Arizona, and on October 23, 2008, at NYU...the latter with speakers including his sister, Amy Wallace Havens; his agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, the editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, editor at Harper's Magazine; Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest and Wallace's later work; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker; as well as authors Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.
Writing and Other Media more » « less
Career
Wallace's first novel, 1987's The Broom of the System, garnered national attention and critical praise. Caryn James of The New York Times called it a successful "manic, human, flawed extravaganza," "emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., John Irving's World According to Garp." Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts, for graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but soon abandoned it. In 1991 he began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston.In 1992, at the behest of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace applied for and won a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.
Wallace published short fiction in Might, GQ, Playboy, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Mid-American Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, Open City, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The New Yorker, and Science.
In 1997, Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, awarded by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews..."Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6"...which had appeared in the magazine.
In 2002, he moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester, and focused on his writing.
Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent during his entire career. Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest.
In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish the manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, that Wallace was working on at the time of his death. An excerpt from the novel was published in the March 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.
In March 2010, it was announced that Wallace's personal papers and archives — drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest — had been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin and will reside at the University's Harry Ransom Center.
Themes and styles
Wallace's fiction is often concerned with irony. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, proposes that television has an ironic influence on fiction writing, and urges literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: "I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems". Wallace used many forms of irony, but focused on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society. A Reader's Companion to Infinite JestWallace's novels often combine various writing modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. His writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes...often nearly as expansive as the text proper. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in "Octet" as well as in the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, "but then no one would read it." Charlie Rose - Jennifer Harbury & Robert Torricelli / David Foster Wallace
According to Wallace, "fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being," and he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside." In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, he describes the human condition of daily crises and chronic disillusionment and rejects solipsism, invoking compassion, mindfulness, and existentialism:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.
Nonfiction work
Wallace covered Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign and had been commissioned shortly before his death to write a story about Barack Obama. He wrote about the September 11 attacks for Rolling Stone; cruise ships (in what became the title essay of his first nonfiction book), state fairs, and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine; the US Open tournament for TENNIS Magazine; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Premiere magazine; the tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire; the special-effects film industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic Monthly; and a Maine lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He also reviewed books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, Wallace was among the authors, artists, politicians and others who wrote short pieces on "the future of the American idea."Other media
Twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men were adapted into a stage play in 2000, the first theatrical adaptation of Wallace's work. The play, Hideous Men, adapted and directed by Dylan McCullough, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2000.A filmed adaptation of Brief Interviews, directed by John Krasinski, was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film stars Julianne Nicholson and an ensemble cast including Christopher Meloni, Rashida Jones, Timothy Hutton, Josh Charles and Will Forte.
The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was adapted by composer Eric Moe into a 50-minute operatic piece, to be performed with accompanying video projections. The piece was described as having "subversively inscribed classical music into pop culture", but received tepid reviews overall.
Awards
- Inclusion of "Good Old Neon" in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002
- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1997—2002
- Lannan Foundation Residency Fellow, July—August 2000
- Named to Usage Panel, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th Edition et seq., 1999
- Inclusion of "The Depressed Person" in Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards
- Illinois State University, Outstanding University Researcher, 1998 and 1999
- Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 1997
- Time magazine's Best Books of the Year (Fiction), 1996
- Salon Book Award (Fiction), 1996
- Lannan Literary Award (Fiction), 1996
- Whiting Writers' Award, 1987
Partial Bibliography more » « less
Novels
- The Broom of the System (1987)
- Infinite Jest (1996)
- The Pale King (2011) (unfinished)
Short story collections
- Girl with Curious Hair (1989) (published in Europe as Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
- Stories (2004)
Nonfiction
- Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990), coauthored with Mark Costello
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (essays) (1997)
- Up, Simba! (2000)
- A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
- Consider the Lobster (essays) (2005)
- McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (paperback reprint of Up, Simba!) (2008)
- This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (a commencement speech given at Kenyon College in 2005) (2009)
- Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (an adaptation of Wallace's undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Amherst, "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality.") (2011)
Contributor
- Fiction International 19:2 (Aids Art, Photomontages from Germany and England) (1991), contributing author
- Grand Street 42 (1992), contributor
- Grand Street 46 (1993), contributor
- The Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Future of Fiction, A Forum Edited by David Foster Wallace (1996), editor
- Open City Number Five : Change or Die (1997), contributing author
- The Best American Essays 2007 (2007), guest editor
- The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007), contributing author
- The Mechanics' Institute Review, Issue 4 (September 2007)
Interviews
- Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993), 127—150. ( text at Dalkey Archive Press website)
- Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace." Salon 9 (1996).
- "The Usage Wars." Radio interview with David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner. The Connection (March 30, 2001).
- Caleb Crain, "Approaching Infinity: David Foster Wallace talks about writing novels, riding the Green Line, and his new book on higher math." Boston Globe. October 26, 2003.
- Michael Goldfarb, "David Foster Wallace." radio interview for The Connection (June 25, 2004). ( full audio interview)
- David Foster Wallace on Bookworm
- Charlie Rose: An interview with David Foster Wallace 27 March 1997
- Zachary Chouteau, "Infinite Zest: Words with the Singular David Foster Wallace." Complete interview done for Bookselling This Week, a publication of the American Bookseller's Association.
- Dave Eggers, "David Foster Wallace." The Believer. November 2003.
- "Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man." Interview with Stacey Schmeidel for Amherst Magazine. Spring 1999. [1]
- A radio interview with David Foster Wallace Aired on the Lewis Burke Frumkes Radio Show in the spring of 1999.
- David Foster Wallace im Interview (2003), aspekte, 21.08.2009
- See The Know(e): dfw for a complete bibliography.
Further Reading more » « less
- Baskin, Jon. "Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and His Critics" The Point. Spring 2009.
- Benzon, Kiki. "Darkness Legible, Unquiet Lines: Mood Disorders in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Creativity, Madness and Civilization. Ed. Richard Pine. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007: 187-198.
- Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1-57003-517-2
- Bresnan, Mark. "The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1 (2008), 51-68.
- Burn, Stephen. "Generational Succession and a Source for the Title of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System." Notes on Contemporary Literature 33.2 (2003), 9-11.
- Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 0-8264-1477-X
- Carlisle, Greg. "Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Austin, L.A.: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9761465-3-7
- Cioffi, Frank Louis. "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Narrative 8.2 (2000), 161-181.
- Delfino, Andrew Steven. "Becoming the New Man in Post-Postmodernist Fiction: Portrayals of Masculinities in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." MA Thesis, Georgia State University. [2]
- Dowling, William, and Bell, Robert. A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest. Xlibris, 2004. ISBN 1-4134-8446-8 ([3])
- Ewijk, Petrus van. "'I' and the 'Other': The relevance of Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas for an understanding of AA's Recovery Program in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." English Text Construction 2.1 (2009), 132-145.
- Goerlandt, Iannis and Luc Herman. "David Foster Wallace." Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors 56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.
- Goerlandt, Iannis. "Fußnoten und Performativität bei David Foster Wallace. Fallstudien." Am Rande bemerkt. Anmerkungspraktiken in literarischen Texten. Ed. Bernhard Metz & Sabine Zubarik. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2008: 387-408.
- Goerlandt, Iannis. "'Put the book down and slowly walk away': Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 309-328.
- Goerlandt, Iannis. "'Still steaming as its many arms extended': Pain in David Foster Wallace's Incarnations of Burned Children." Sprachkunst 37.2 (2006), 297-308.
- Harris, Jan Ll.'Addiction and the Societies of Control: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest'[4] ', paper delivered at Figuring Addictions/Rethinking Consumption conference, Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, April 4—5, 2002
- Harris, Michael. "A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity: A Review of Everything and More." Notices of the AMS 51.6 (2004), 632-638. ( full pdf-text)
- Holland, Mary K. "'The Art's Heart's Purpose': Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 218-242.
- Jacobs, Tim. "The Fight: Considering David Foster Wallace Considering You". Rain Taxi Review of Books. Online Edition, Part Two. Winter 2009.
- Jacobs, Timothy. "The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 271. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. New York: Gale, 2009.
- Jacobs, Timothy. "The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.3 (2007): 265-292.
- Jacobs, Timothy. "American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace." Comparative Literature Studies 38.3 (2001): 215-231.
- Jacobs, Timothy. "David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System." Ed. Alan Hedblad. Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Detroit: Gale Research Press, 2001. 41-50.
- Jacobs, Timothy. "David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." The Explicator 58.3 (2000): 172-175.
- Kelly, Adam. "David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline." Irish Journal of American Studies Online 2 (2010). Link.
- LeClair, Tom. "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996), 12-37.
- Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway, 2010.
- Mason, Wyatt. "Don't like it? You don't have to play." London Review of Books 26.22 (2004). http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/maso02_.html
- Morris, David. "Lived Time and Absolute Knowing: Habit and Addiction from Infinite Jest to the Phenomenology of Spirit." Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 30 (2001), 375-415.
- Nichols, Catherine. "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (2001), 3-16.
- Rother, James. "Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave. The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993), 216-234. ISBN 1-56478-123-2
- Tysdal, Dan. "Inarticulation and the Figure of Enjoyment: Raymond Carver's Minimalism Meets David Foster Wallace's 'A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life.'" Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 38.1 (2003), 66-83.
This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "David Foster Wallace", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
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