Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions death by suicide.

Born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York, David Foster Wallace was a vital figure in contemporary US literature. He was raised in a household steeped in academia. Both his parents were professors at the University of Illinois, where he spent much of his childhood. As he describes in his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Wallace was a talented junior tennis player. As he notes in the essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” however, he was unable to maintain his athletic prowess into his later teen years.

As a young man, Wallace attended Amherst College, where he pursued a double major in English and philosophy. During this time he began to hone his craft as a writer, experimenting with different styles and forms of expression. After graduating from Amherst, Wallace studied creative writing at the University of Arizona, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in 1987 (as he notes in the essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”).

Wallace burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with the publication of his debut novel, The Broom of the System.