David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York and grew up in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois. As a teenager, Wallace was a skilled junior tennis player. Wallace attended Amherst College; his senior thesis would become his first novel, The Broom of the System. Wallace accepted various college-level teaching positions after graduation, eventually settling at Pomona College in Claremont, California, teaching creative writing and English while also pursuing his writing. Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, would become his most influential work. He also published short fiction in numerous publications, winning a MacArthur Fellowship for his story “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6.” A lifelong sufferer of depression, Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself on September 12, 2008.