“He was a writer who other writers looked to with awe,” said one of Wallace’s editors, Michael Pietsch, to The New York Times. “He had a mind that was constantly working on more cylinders than most people, but he was amazingly gentle and kind.” Wallace’s two major novels, “The Broom of the System,” published in 1987 when he was 26, and “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, had made him the most prominent post-modernist writer, and arguably America’s most well-known writer under age 40.
“The entire Amherst community mourns the loss of David Foster Wallace, and we offer condolences and deepest sympathy to his family and friends,” said College President Tony Marx. “We were truly fortunate to have been graced by his brilliant presence as a student of philosophy and English, and following his graduation in 1985, as a dedicated and generous alumnus in the years since then.” In 1999, Wallace was awarded an honorary degree from the College.
Curiously, Wallace only began writing seriously, his mother said, at Amherst College.
A member of the class of 1985, Wallace studied creative writing and was a Philosophy and English major. He was also deeply interested in mathematics. He wrote a Philosophy thesis on modal logic, which is the mathematically oriented logic of probability, possibility, and necessity. For his English thesis, Wallace wrote a four hundred-page novel.
“It was at the time a minor miracle that the English Department accepted a project of such girth; the standard expectation for an Honors essay was—and still is—fifty pages of well-polished prose and undergraduate novels were decidedly frowned upon,” wrote Wallace’s Senior Honors advisor in English Dale Perterson in a memoriam [see Arts & Living, page 9]. “But David’s academic reputation preceded him and his ambition could not reasonably be thwarted.”
Wallace took the novel with him when he graduated from Amherst, and went on to the University of Arizona to get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. That senior thesis became his first novel, The Broom of the System in 1987. Nearly 10 years later, his second novel Infinite Jest, received tremendous acclaim, and sits on Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.”
In addition to his two major novels, his numerous essays, on topics ranging from John McCain to Roger Federer, graced magazines such as Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s, as did his pieces of short fiction. In 1997, he received a MacArthur “Genius” grant.
Since 2002, Wallace had been the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. “The death of Professor David Foster Wallace Friday night was, for the world, the loss of one of literature’s brightest stars. For Pomona College, it was the loss of an equally brilliant teacher — as well as a colleague and friend,” said Pomona College President David Oxtoby in a statement. “Many of his students have come to me over the years, marveling at the transformative experience of working with him in one of his intense creative writing classes. They told me how tough and demanding he could be, and at the same time they wondered at how a man of such creative genius could also be so kind, so caring, so generous of his time, his energy and his wisdom.”
“He had the very rare gift — something he shared with Seamus Heaney — of carrying the greatness of his ability intact within him and never letting it obtrude upon his colleagues. He was just a laborer in the field along with the rest of us,” wrote Verlyn Klinkenborg—a former colleague of Wallace’s at Pomona—in a New York Times editorial remembrance yesterday. “I came to Pomona’s English Department expecting to find a hurricane of archness and ferocity. I found instead a humanist and a compatriot, and a man who will be very deeply missed.”