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David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, short stories and essays, as well as a professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel ''Infinite Jest'', which was cited by ''Time'' magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Wallace's last, unfinished novel, ''The Pale King'', was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A biography of Wallace was published in September 2012, and an extensive critical literature on his work has developed in the past decade. ''Los Angeles Times'' book editor David Ulin has called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years." ==Personal life== Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, the son of Sally Jean (née Foster) and James Donald Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois.〔Contrary to some reports in reliable sources, David Foster Wallace never lived in Philo, Illinois, nor even "set foot" there. (Boswell and Burn (eds.), 94)〕 In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school and Urbana High School. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, an experience he reflects upon in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (first published in ''Harper's Magazine'' under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes"). James D. Wallace, David's father, was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now Emeritus Professor. David's mother, Sally Foster Wallace, attended graduate school in English composition at the University of Illinois and 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. Wallace attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy. He participated in several extracurricular activities, including glee club; Wallace's sister recalls that "David had a lovely singing voice." Within philosophy Wallace pursued focuses in modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and published posthumously as ''Fate, Time, and Language''. His other honors thesis, written for his English major, eventually became his first novel, ''The Broom of the System''. Wallace graduated ''summa cum laude'' for both theses in 1985. By the end of his undergraduate education, Wallace was committed to fiction; he told David Lipsky, "Writing (), I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." He pursued a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona, completing it in 1987, by which time ''Broom'' had been published. Wallace moved to Boston for graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but left the program soon after. In the early 1990s, Wallace became obsessed with the memoirist Mary Karr. Despite her statements that she was not interested, Wallace got her name tattooed on his body and even contemplated killing her husband, according to biographer D.T. Max. The two later had a tumultuous relationship during which, Karr reported, Wallace once threw a coffee table at her and attempted to push her out of a car. Wallace married painter Karen L. Green, whom he met in 2002, on December 27, 2004. Wallace struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, depression, suicide attempts, institutionalization, and at times inappropriate sexual behavior. Wallace is reported to have slept with some of his female students while teaching at university and sometimes exhibited stalking-like obsessive behavior when enamored of a woman. Dogs played an important role in Wallace's life: Wallace was very close to his two dogs, Bella and Werner,〔 had spoken of opening a dog shelter,〔 and, according to Jonathan Franzen, "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and () unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them."〔 Born to atheist parents, Wallace attempted to join the Catholic Church twice but "flunk() the period of inquiry," and later attended a Mennonite church.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=David Foster Wallace warms up )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「David Foster Wallace」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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