David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York. His father James taught philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while his mother Sally taught English at Parkland College. His penchant for philosophy was apparent by age 14, when he and his father read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together. Upon moving to Amherst College in the 1980s, Wallace was quickly identified as a prodigious philosophical student and unrelenting researcher. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst in 1985 with majors in English and philosophy. He focused on modal logic and mathematics as branches of philosophy and received the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize for his senior thesis, which was published posthumously as “Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will” in 2011 (Lipsky, David. “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.” Rolling Stone, 20 Sept. 2019).

Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was based on his honors English thesis. He found the writing experience laborious, feeling that it consumed too much of him. That same year, Wallace earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Two years later, he enrolled at Harvard to study philosophy but soon dropped out (Lipsky).