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The 2000s in America

Wallace, David Foster

by Sally Driscoll

Identification: American author and educator

Born: February 21, 1962; Ithaca, New York

Died: September 12, 2008; Claremont, California

David Foster Wallace was a highly influential and versatile writer known especially for his dark humor, verbosity, and philosophical insight.

During the 2000s, David Foster Wallace continued to prove himself as one of America’s most masterful writers while focusing more on essays and nonfiction than on novels and short stories, genres that brought him accolades during the 1990s. While many general readers were intimidated by the 1,079-page length of Infinite Jest (1996), which was nominated in 2005 by Time magazine as one of the “100 best English-language novels published since 1923” and which earned him a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the “genius grant”), he also demonstrated his powerful wit, intellect, and grip of the English language in magazine articles that were accessible to a mainstream audience. Among his most memorable essays are “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub,” about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, published in Rolling Stone in April 2000; “Consider the Lobster,” published in Gourmet in August 2004; and “Federer as Religious Experience,” published in the New York Times in August 2006.

In 2002, Wallace accepted the Roy Edward Disney Professorship in Creative Writing and a professorship in English at Pomona College in Claremont, California. The following year, he published Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, a treatise on mathematics, one of his many intellectual passions. He followed that with the critically acclaimed collection of stories, Oblivion (2004).

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College on the importance of leading a compassionate life. The impassioned speech reverberated throughout the wider academic community and was reprinted in the Wall Street Journal and the Times (London) before being published in book form as This Is Water (2009).

After publishing a collection of essays, Consider the Lobster (2006), Wallace returned to novels, writing The Pale King (published posthumously in 2011), his first since Infinite Jest. However, the depression that he had suffered throughout most of his adult life began to consume his everyday existence, and on September 12, 2008, he committed suicide by hanging himself.

David Foster Wallace

AUGHTS_WallaceDavidFoster.jpg

(Courtesy of Steve Rhodes)

Impact

Wallace’s greatest contribution to literature is his style of writing: self-conscious, witty, and verbose, marked by a keen sense of observation as he pursues and documents truth. His essays, short stories, novels, and nonfiction are studied in writing and literature programs and have impacted the work of many modern writers. Critics believe that Wallace’s legacy will be defined better in time, as his writing seems to represent the end of the period of postmodernism and the beginning of something else, often referred to as post-postmodernism.

Further Reading

1 

Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2003. Print.

2 

Harris, Charles B. “David Foster Wallace: That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself.” Critique 51.2 (2010): 168. Print.

3 

Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Driscoll, Sally. "Wallace, David Foster." The 2000s in America, edited by Craig Belanger, Salem Press, 2013. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=2000_0388.
APA 7th
Driscoll, S. (2013). Wallace, David Foster. In C. Belanger (Ed.), The 2000s in America. Salem Press.
CMOS 17th
Driscoll, Sally. "Wallace, David Foster." Edited by Craig Belanger. The 2000s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2013. Accessed September 18, 2025. online.salempress.com.