He ended his life by hanging himself: Who is David Foster Wallace?

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962; Ithaca, New York - September 12, 2008, California) was an American writer of novels, essays and short stories.

He was 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds on a good day. With his bandana tied at the back and granny glasses, he looked a little pirate, a little housewife. He always kept his hair long. He had dark eyes, a soft voice, a caveman chin, and cute, pointed lips, which were his most striking features.

He loafed around and rolled on his heels like a former athlete as if everything physical was a pleasure to him. David Foster Wallace tried almost all of them in turns: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was a hunt for knowledge, accumulating answers to the questions of how and why. “Today I can get 500,000 different pieces of information about anything,” he once said, “maybe 25 of them are important. My job is to give them meaning.”

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.  His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".

His life was a plan that ended on the wrong route. Wallace was a model student throughout high school, played football, played tennis, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before graduating from Amherst, attended writing school, and had his novel published; He made the fussy, abusive, and hard-pressed editors and writers fall in love with him with his wide-open eyes.

He published a thousand-page novel, won an award you can only get when you're a genius, wrote essays that capture what it means to be alive in the modern world, accepted a special chair at Pomona College in California to teach writing, published another book, and in 2008 he published 46 books. He hanged himself at the age of 10.

“What really needs to be said about David Foster Wallace is that he was a once-in-a-century talent,” says his friend and former editor Colin Harrison. “We may never see anything like it again in our lifetime – I can shout that. “It was like a comet flying over the earth.”

His 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, was Bible-thumping, spawning books with descriptions and commentary, such as Understanding David Foster Wallace – a book his friends could write about and line up to buy. He struggled with clinical depression for decades, something only his family and close friends knew about.

David grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His father, Jim, was a philosophy teacher at the University of Illinois. His mother, Sally, is an English teacher at a local community college. He grew up in an academic home – balanced, respectful – language games in the car, tidy rooms, heroic library.

David was the perfect blend of his quirky parents' talents.

From an early age, David was, as he made clear, “very fragile.” He loved TV and was incredibly excited to watch shows like Batman or The Wild Wild West. (His parents let him watch such “hardcore” shows. Once a week.) David could remember all the dialogue of the show and, like some kind of weatherman, could predict when the story would break, and where the characters would give up. No one saw him as a genius or treated him as such.

In 1984, Costello attended Yale Law School; Wallace was a lonely senior. He double majored in English and philosophy, which meant two major writing projects. He dealt with formal logic in philosophy.

Next was a master's degree. Philosophy would be an obvious choice. “My father would have his children have their limbs removed without anesthesia before he could push them about anything,” Wallace said. “I knew I would have to go to graduate school, so I applied to one of those English programs instead and didn't tell anyone.

After Amherst, Wallace went to the University of Arizona for his MFA. That's where he wore a bandana: "I started wearing them in Tucson because it was always a hundred degrees and I was sweating so much it was dripping on the page." The woman he was dating thought the bandana was a smart choice.

Arizona was a strange experience: first grade where people weren't happy to see her. He wanted to write the way he wanted to write – funny, overstuffed, non-linear, and weird. The teachers were all "hard realists." That was the first problem. The second problem was Wallace. “I guess I was kind of a jerk,” he said. One of his stories, "Here and There", won the 1989 O Henry Award after being published in a literary magazine.