David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (born February 21 1962) is an American novelist, essay, and short story writer, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. James Wallace had recently finished his Ph.D. at Cornell University; the family soon relocated to central Illinois, where James found work as a philosophy instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962. James won a professorial appointment within a year and became tenured in 1968. Sally attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and eventually became a professor of English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, where she won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996. David's younger sister, Amy, has practiced law in Arizona since 2005. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He... full article at wikipedia