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Who is David Foster Wallace?

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Who is David Foster Wallace?

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It is a strange question to pose, given the extent to which we’re trained not to let lurking authorial personae distract us from matters of content, but one that Consider the Lobster demands. As is his wont, Foster Wallace has filled his pages with an endless array of footnotes, footnotes of footnotes, interpolations, parenthetical notes, and even, in the concluding essay “Host,” boxed-off pieces of supplementary information linked back to the main text with arrows. His tendency to extreme self-clarification is at times grating—and in the case of “Host” virtually unreadable—but Foster Wallace is careful to reward the reader who hears him out, as some of the collection’s most humorous side notes are those in nearly microscopic print (for instance, who knew that “Cannabic Solipsism” is a technical term for “the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable”?). Granted, page-long annotations do suggest a certain self-indulgence, but they als

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Novelist David Foster Wallace’s life seemed to be a scene from a great American tale — full of unique experiences, unsurpassed opportunity and a tragic ending. It seemed that from a young age, he was on the path to become an author. Born in 1962 to an English teacher and a philosopher, David Foster Wallace spent most of his childhood writing stories and playing tennis. David Foster Wallace studied at Amherst College, where his father was an alumnus, concentrating in the fields of English, philosophy and mathematics. His senior English thesis provided the basis for his first novel, The Broom of the System, a surreal journey through what some would consider mundane activities. For this and his philosophy thesis, he became an award winner, taking home the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. Wallace then studied at the University of Arizona, where he achieved a master’s degree in creative writing in 1987. It was about this time that he began to send his stories to publishers. Many were accepted,

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