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David Foster WallaceA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
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).
By David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
David Foster Wallace
Consider The Lobster
Consider The Lobster
David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
The Pale King
The Pale King
David Foster Wallace
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