David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was an American novelist and essayist whose Infinite Jest and his essay collections attempted to re-enchant fiction in the face of postmodern irony, at enormous personal cost.

David Foster Wallace arrived in American letters with The Broom of the System (1987), a debut that showed genuine promise without quite announcing the scale of his ambition. Infinite Jest (1996) announced it without equivocation. The novel — 1,079 pages including nearly a hundred pages of footnotes, set in a near-future North America defined by waste, addiction, and entertainment — stands as one of the most audacious attempts in postwar American fiction to use the novel form to diagnose a cultural moment. It is also genuinely funny, moving, and structurally intricate in ways that reward multiple readings.

His nonfiction was sometimes better — or at least easier to love. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are essay collections that combine ferocious intelligence with a quality of honest self-examination rare in literary journalism. The title essay of the former, about a week on a cruise ship, is among the funniest and most devastating pieces of American cultural criticism of its era.

The Pale King, published posthumously in 2011 from the manuscript Wallace left at his death by suicide in 2008, is about boredom — specifically, the boredom of IRS audit work — used as a lens for exploring what sustained attention really requires of us. It is unfinished and brilliant in alternating chapters. Wallace’s influence on a generation of American writers has been immense and sometimes regrettable; the imitations tend to get the difficulty without the humanity that makes the difficulty worthwhile.

A Defining Voice of His Generation

David Foster Wallace was one of the most brilliant, ambitious, and influential American writers of his generation, a novelist and essayist whose innovative, intellectually dazzling, and deeply human work reshaped the landscape of contemporary fiction. Celebrated for his encyclopaedic range, his formal experimentation, and his profound engagement with the anxieties of modern American life, Wallace combined postmodern technique with an earnest, searching sincerity that set him apart. His tragic death in 2008 cut short an extraordinary career, but his work continues to exert a powerful influence on writers and readers, and he is widely regarded as a defining literary voice of the late twentieth century.

Infinite Jest

Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and discussed American novels of recent decades, a vast, sprawling, and formally audacious work set in a near-future North America and exploring addiction, entertainment, depression, and the search for meaning. Famous for its enormous length, its hundreds of endnotes, and its intricate structure, the novel is both a daunting challenge and a deeply rewarding experience, combining comedy, sadness, and philosophical depth. Its portrait of a culture consumed by the pursuit of pleasure and distraction proved remarkably prescient, and it remains the cornerstone of Wallace’s reputation.

The Essayist

Wallace was an equally brilliant essayist, and for many readers his nonfiction offers the most accessible and enjoyable entry into his work. His essays, collected in volumes such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, apply his extraordinary intelligence, curiosity, and humour to subjects ranging from a luxury cruise to tennis to a state fair to the ethics of eating lobster. Marked by their footnoted digressions, their self-aware honesty, and their dazzling observation, these essays are widely admired as among the finest of their era and showcase his distinctive voice at its most engaging.

Sincerity After Irony

A central concern of Wallace’s work was the problem of irony and detachment in contemporary culture, and his great ambition was to find a way beyond the cynical, knowing posture of postmodern fiction toward genuine sincerity, empathy, and human connection. He worried that irony had become a trap, a defence against feeling, and he sought to write fiction that could address loneliness, sadness, and the longing for meaning with honesty and care. This struggle to combine intellectual sophistication with earnest emotional truth is at the heart of his work and a key to his profound influence.

A Singular Style

Wallace’s prose is instantly recognisable, marked by long, recursive sentences, copious footnotes and endnotes, a vast and precise vocabulary, and a voice that blends the hyper-intellectual with the colloquial and the deeply sincere. He pushed the resources of language and form to their limits, creating a style that mirrors the overloaded, fragmented texture of modern consciousness. Demanding yet exhilarating, his writing rewards patient and attentive readers with insight, humour, and emotional depth, and his stylistic innovations have been enormously influential on contemporary writing.

Mental Health and Humanity

Much of Wallace’s work grapples, directly and indirectly, with depression, addiction, and the difficulty of being a person in the modern world, drawing on his own long struggle with mental illness. He wrote about loneliness, despair, and the search for connection with rare honesty and compassion, and his famous commencement address, later published as This Is Water, offers a moving meditation on attention, empathy, and how to live a conscious life. This deep humanity, his concern with how to be a good and connected person amid distraction and pain, gives his often-difficult work its lasting emotional resonance.

Where to Begin with David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature is profound, and his ambitious fusion of intellectual brilliance, formal innovation, and earnest emotional inquiry has shaped a generation of writers. For newcomers, his essay collections, particularly A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, offer the most accessible introduction, while the ambitious Infinite Jest awaits readers ready for a greater challenge. For readers seeking fiction and nonfiction of extraordinary intelligence, humour, and humanity that grapples seriously with the dilemmas of modern life, Wallace remains an essential and unforgettable writer.

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• Where to Start with David Foster Wallace