Biography david foster wallace
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Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
D.T. Max
pp. Viking
On an imaginary scale of internal discomfort for David Foster Wallace (measured zero to 10), the idea of his being subject to a biography would likely have rated nine point something.
Perhaps the only thing that would have created more of an irritant for the one-time Illinois State professor would be one of his former students¹ reviewing that book. One can just imagine Dave (as he preferred his students refer to him) marking up the article with a barely-restrained critical eye, the page plastered with “WC’s” for poor word choice and scrawls of “CL!” for clunky, ill-formed sentences. And of course there would be the inevitable critiques of grammar that would not meet muster of Wallace’s ability to internally diagram sentences with ease.
In public and in person, DFW would often downplay his talent/literary accomplishments/impact with a self-deriding Midwestern humility. It’s not like Dave
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David Foster Wallace
American writer (–)
David Foster Wallace (February 21, – September 12, ) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the best English-language novels from to [1] His posthumous novel, The Pale King (), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".[2]
Wallace grew up in Illinois and attended Amherst College and the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he earned his MFA. He taught English at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. After struggling with depression for many years,[3] he died by suicide in , at age
Early life and education
[edit]David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace (née
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Granada House was on the grounds of the Brighton Marine hospital near the Massachusetts Turnpike. efternamn found it funny that a “marine hospital” should be nowhere near water. He gives a good picture of its fictional counterpart in “Infinite Jest”:
Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road’s east side, fryst vatten Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no resident fryst vatten allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of Commonwealth Ave.
The compound consisted of seven buildings—“seven moons orbiting a dead planet,” as it is described in “Infinite Jest”—all leased to various substance-abuse and mental-health assistance groups. Wallace met Deb Larson, th