David Foster Wallace
In this essay I am going to do my best to give the reader the most informative explanation (within my constraints) of one of the most brilliant authors of the age, David Foster Wallace. He was the author of many great and insightful (at times, dark) works. Some of the more popular/well-known pieces being The Broom of the System, Girl with Curious Hair, Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and finally his incomplete novel, The Pale King. In all honesty, to even scratch the surface of an individual with this amount of depth would require a work similar in size and time to his "tree-killer" of a novel, Infinite Jest. That being said, I hold the belief that every free-thinking individual should at least know-this man's name in hopes that it may show them the way to his works on what it means to be "a fucking human being".
David Foster Wallace was born on 21 February 1962 and finally met his end 12 September 2008 at the age of 46. Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to his parents, James Wallace and Sally Foster. His father, a previous graduate student in philosophy at Cornell, was from a family of professionals. His mother, on the other hand, was an English major at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, with a more rural background with family residing in Maine and New Brunswick. She was also the first in her family to acquire a Bachelor's Degree. At the age of 4, David moved with his family to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois for a better job opportunity. His home life was very structured (dinner at 5:45 p.m. and lights out at precisely 8:30 p.m.) and was very...