David Foster Wallace was widely regarded as one of the best writers of his generation. He wrote short stories and essays, although he is most known for his novels, including Infinite Jest (1996) and The Pale King (2011). In addition to fiction, Wallace wrote articles for a variety of publications, including “Consider the Lobster,” which he wrote for the now defunct magazine Gourmet.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, the son of a philosophy professor father and an English professor mother. He spent most of his youth in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. As a teen, he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player, an experience he later wrote about in an essay for Harper’s. He attended Amherst College where he majored in philosophy and English. His senior thesis in philosophy was published posthumously as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. The senior thesis he wrote in English became the manuscript for his first novel The Broom of the System, which was published in 1987.

Wallace began teaching college courses at Emerson and later Illinois State. By 1991, he had begun work on Infinite Jest, his second novel, which was published to great acclaim in 1996.