David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (born February 21, 1962 in Ithaca, New York) is an American novelist, and short story writer. He graduated from Amherst College in 1986 and from the University of Arizona. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1997), for his second novel, Infinite Jest. He taught at Illinois State University for most of the 1990s. In the fall of 2002, he began teaching at Pomona College as the Roy E. Disney '51 Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English.

Literature

Surveys

• James Rother, "Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave. The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993), 216-234. ISBN 1564781232
• Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1570035172
• Iannis Goerlandt and Luc Herman, "David Foster Wallace." Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors 56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.

In-depth studies

• Tom LeClair, "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996), 12-37.
• Frank Louis Coffi, "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Narrative 8.2 (2000), 161-181.
• Catherine Nichols, "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (2001), 3-16.
• Stephen Burn, "Generational Succession and a Source for the Title of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System." Notes on Contemporary Literature 33.2 (2003), 9-11.
• Stephen Burn, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 082641477X
• Michael Harris, "A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity: A Review of Everything and More." Notices of the AMS 51.6 (2004), 632-638. (full pdf-text)

Interviews

• Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993), 127-150. ISBN 1564781232
• Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace." Salon 9 (1996). http://archive.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html
• "The Usage Wars." Radio interview with David Foster Wallace and Brian Garner. The Connection (30 March 2001).
• Michael Goldfarb, "David Foster Wallace." radio interview for The Connection (25 June 2004). (full audio interview)