David Foster Wallace - A Look at His Life and Work

A graduate of Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, Matt Kafker now attends university in pursuit of a postsecondary degree. In his free time, Matt Kafker enjoys a variety of activities, including reading. He lists David Foster Wallace among his favorite authors. 

Born in 1962 in Ithaca, New York, David Foster Wallace was a prodigious novelist and essayist whose often dense writing is filled with a mix of dark humor, ironic wit, sadness, experimental language, and digressions in the form of footnotes. His best-known work is Infinite Jest, a massive novel comprising nearly 1,100 pages that are annotated with footnotes throughout. 

The publication of Infinite Jest in 1996 established Wallace in the literary world and attracted a devoted following of readers. The novel also caught the attention of many critics and earned Wallace a spot on a number of “best of” lists across the country. 

Although fans and critics anxiously awaited Wallace’s next novel, he never published another one in his lifetime. His writing following Infinite Jest was mostly in the form of short fiction and nonfiction pieces, published in collections such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 

Over the course of his career, Wallace received several awards and accolades, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant and three O. Henry Awards. After battling depression his entire adult life, Wallace committed suicide in 2008. The novel he had been working on at the time of his death, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011.