David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was born in 1962 in Ithaca, New York. He studied English and Philosophy and, during his adolescence, he was a federated tennis player, an activity that would become essential in his work of fiction and non-fiction. He published his first novel, The Broom of The System, in 1987, a book influenced by one of his literary idols, Thomas Pynchon, and which received very positive reviews from the press at the time. The second novel did not appear until nine years later, in the form of the more than a thousand pages of the colossal, delirious, and innovative Infinite Jest. Time magazine considered it one of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. In the period between the publication of the two novels, Wallace taught literature at Emerson College in Boston, wrote short stories and articles for the press, including the very influential "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", a reflection on the trends of the new American fiction. The collections of essays and journalistic articles A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005) confirmed Wallace as one of the most original writers of his generation, capable of transforming a text about tennis player Roger Federer into a work of art. The success and recognition of critics and the public did not, however, alleviate the problems of depression that Wallace faced throughout his life. In 2008, at just 46 years old, David Foster Wallace committed suicide. Based on the work he left incomplete, his American publisher decided to publish, in 2011, the posthumous novel The Pale King, the literary testament of a genius of universal literature.