David Foster Wallace

Wallace grew up in Illinois, the son of a philosophy professor, and was a nationally ranked junior tennis player before studying philosophy and English at Amherst, where his senior thesis on modal logic was later published as a monograph. He struggled with depression and substance abuse from his twenties on, spending time in halfway houses and recovery programs that fed directly into Infinite Jest.

That 1996 novel, over a thousand pages with hundreds of endnotes, made him a defining voice of his generation, followed by essay collections including A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again that turned cruise ships and state fairs into philosophical inquiry. He taught creative writing at Illinois State and later Pomona College.

After going off an antidepressant he had relied on for decades, he suffered a severe depressive relapse and took his own life in 2008 at forty-six, leaving the unfinished novel The Pale King.