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The 1990s in America

David Foster Wallace

by Alan Haslam

Identification American author

Wallace is best known for the critically acclaimed publication of his 1996 epic Infinite Jest, a complicated, layered parody of a future North America.

David Foster Wallace defined postmodern writing for the 1990’s as he crafted difficult, hyperliterate, sprawling, multicharacter novels and short stories full of absurd and extreme situations. Characteristic elements seen in Wallace’s writing include juxtapositions of linguistic styles, such as colloquialisms and polysyllabic, esoteric language; textual elements more common to other “nonliterary” modes of writing, such as acronyms and extensive footnotes; and pervasive irony and satire. However, in all of Wallace’s work, there lurks hope of redemption, obscured as it may be.

David Foster Wallace reads his work at the 2002 New Yorker Magazine Festival.

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Infinite Jest, published in 1996, uses all these elements to tell a story that intertwines a family, the Incandenzas; a film titled Infinite Jest, which is so engrossing that viewers lose interest in everything except repeatedly watching the film; a tennis academy; and a halfway house, among other things. In a statement against corporatism and globalization, the novel’s future world depicts North America as a single state, the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.).

Corporations purchase naming rights to each calendar year, with such years as “Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.” By way of a criticism of industrialization, the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada have become a massive hazardous-waste-dumping site known as “The Great Concavity”/“The Great Convexity.” In the midst of all this, Infinite Jest explores the desires that unite all humanity.

Wallace next published the short-story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), a challenging, fragmented text with such diverse subject matter as a young boy perched atop the diving board at a local pool; middle-aged men in uncomfortable sexual situations; and a certain desperate woman who narrates her pathologies in the discourse of therapy-speak.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to two academics, Sally Foster Wallace and James Donald Wallace. James became tenured in 1968 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Sally became a professor of English at Parkland College in Champaign. Wallace ranked as a junior tennis player as an adolescent, a theme that surfaces in Infinite Jest and others of his works. He attended Amherst College, as his father did, where he double-majored in English and philosophy and graduated in 1985, summa cum laude; he then earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he finished in 1987, and secured a position in the English Department at Illinois State University in 1992. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1997. Wallace relocated to Claremont, California, in 2002 to become the first Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He committed suicide on September 12, 2008, at the age of forty-six.

Impact

David Foster Wallace challenged conventions of fiction, mixing genres and modes to capture the essence of modern America through philosophy, science, humor, irony, and the absurd.

Further Reading

1 

Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

2 

Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.

3 

_______. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Haslam, Alan. "David Foster Wallace." The 1990s in America, edited by Milton Berman, Salem Press, 2009. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1990_1593.
APA 7th
Haslam, A. (2009). David Foster Wallace. In M. Berman (Ed.), The 1990s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Haslam, Alan. "David Foster Wallace." Edited by Milton Berman. The 1990s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2009. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.