ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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; his senior English thesis, the novel The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, and his senior philosophy thesis was published as Fate, Time, and Language in 2010. He earned a master of fine arts at the University of Arizona. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. He also published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion; the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster; a book about hip-hop, written with his friend Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers; and a book about infinity, Everything and More. Over the years, Wallace taught at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award and served on 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 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.