Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Chronology

xix Chronology 1962 Born February 21, in Ithaca, New York, to James D. Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. Six months later, the Wallace family moves to Urbana, Illinois. Wallace attends Urbana High School. 1980 In the fall, Wallace enrolls at Amherst College, where he rooms with Mark Costello. Seminal experiences at the college include his discovery of fiction by Don DeLillo and Manuel Puig (both recommended by his professor, Andrew Parker). Graduation is delayed by a year after Wallace takes two semesters off (spring ’82 and fall ’83), and spends the hiatus driving a school bus and reading voraciously. 1985 Graduates summa cum laude in English and Philosophy. Following the example of Costello, who completed a novel as his graduating thesis the year before, Wallace studied under Dale Peterson and submits a draft of The Broom of the System as his English thesis. His philosophy thesis—Richard Taylor’s Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality—wins the department’s Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize in Philosophy. Enters M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona. 1987 The Broom of the System published in January. Graduates in August, and is named Teaching Assistant of the Year by the University of Arizona. Apart from juvenilia, Wallace’s first journal publication— “Lyndon”—appears in Arrival in April 1987. After winning a residency fellowship spends the summer at the Yaddo artists’ colony, and then takes a position as a visiting instructor at Amherst. 1988 Girl with Curious Hair is scheduled for a fall 1988 publication date, but the book’s release is delayed as Wallace is caught up in legal battles over references to real people in the stories. “Little Expressionless Animals” wins a John Traine Humor Prize from the Paris Review. Publishes first critical essay—“Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”—which appears in the fall issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Begins correspondence with Jonathan Franzen. 1989 After some revision, Girl with Curious Hair is finally published in xx CHRONOLOGY September. Receives a Writer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, and an Illinois Arts Council Award for Non-Fiction. Moves to Somerville, Massachusetts, where he shares an apartment at 35 Houghton Street with Mark Costello, but spends August back at Yaddo. Enrolls at Harvard, intending to complete a Ph.D in philosophy, but withdraws after checking himself into campus health services. Enters AA in September. 1990 Though initially planned as an essay, Signifying Rappers (coauthored with Mark Costello) is published in October 1990, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “Here and There” selected for inclusion in O. Henry Prize Stories. Wallace spends six months in Brighton’s Granada House—a halfway house—and writes his first book review, which is published in Washington Post Book World in April 1990. Teaches at Boston’s Emerson College. Contracted to write a “short piece” on TV and fiction for Harper’s that becomes the template for his famous 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction essay, “E Unibus Pluram.” 1991 Though Wallace had made three false-starts on projects resembling Infinite Jest between 1986 and 1989, work on the novel begins in earnest in 1991–92. 1992 Moves to Syracuse, where he lives in an apartment on Miles Avenue . Begins correspondence with Don DeLillo. 1993 The Review of Contemporary Fiction devotes a third of its Younger Writers issue to Wallace. Hired by Illinois State University as an associate professor. Finishes draft manuscript of Infinite Jest, though the editing process continues through to the middle of 1995. 1996 Wallace’s cruise-ship essay, “Shipping Out,” appears in the January issue of Harper’s. In February, Infinite Jest is published to great acclaim , and by early March the novel is in its sixth printing. Research for The Pale King is underway at least as early as this point: Wallace audits an elementary accounting class in the fall, and in the coming years takes more advanced classes and corresponds with tax professionals. Receives a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Salon Book Award. 1997 A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again published in February. Awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 6” wins the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for the best short story published that year in the magazine. 1999 In May, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is published. Award- CHRONOLOGY xxi ed an honorary doctor of letters degree from Amherst. “The...