WRITER

David Foster Wallace

1962 - 2008

Photo of David Foster Wallace

Icon of person David Foster Wallace

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. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of David Foster Wallace has received more than 10,415,002 page views. His biography is available in 44 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 40 in 2019). David Foster Wallace is the 2,983rd most popular writer (up from 3,155th in 2019), the 3,764th most popular biography from United States (up from 4,135th in 2019) and the 330th most popular American Writer.

Memorability Metrics

  • 10M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 53.03

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 44

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 3.28

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 4.79

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Infinite jest
Saddness, Compulsive behavior, Entertainment
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
1996
Everything and more
maths, math, mathematics
*"A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite."*—The New York Times. With a new introduction by Neal Stephenson. Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? David Foster Wallace brings his intellectual ambition and characteristic bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that there was more than one kind of infinity. Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.
2003
The broom of the system
Fiction, Missing persons, Popular culture
1987
Oblivion
Fiction, Literature, Short stories
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
2004
A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again
Fiction, Humor (Nonfiction), Wit and humor
A collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories -- which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere -- explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.Among the stories are "The Depressed Person", a dazzling portrayal of a woman's mental state; "Adult World", which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men", a dark, hilarious series of portraits of men whose fear of women renders them grotesque.
1997
Brief interviews with hideous men
Man-woman relationships, Short Stories, Fiction
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
1999

Page views of David Foster Wallaces by language

Over the past year David Foster Wallace has had the most page views in the with 966,989 views, followed by Italian (104,957), and German (62,442). In terms of yearly growth of page views the top 3 wikpedia editions are Hungarian (517.89%), Latin (203.71%), and Cornish (199.69%)

Among WRITERS

Among writers, David Foster Wallace ranks 2,983 out of 7,302. Before him are Bruce Sterling, Richard Baxter, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Unsuri, Bret Easton Ellis, and Laura Bridgman. After him are Tariq Ali, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Auguste Barbier, Miklós Radnóti, Wilfred Owen, and Jim Rohn.

Most Popular Writers in Wikipedia

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1962, David Foster Wallace ranks 121. Before him are Claudia Sheinbaum, Sumi Jo, Ron McGovney, Maia Morgenstern, Michel Qissi, and Lori Lightfoot. After him are Wynton Rufer, Patrick Ewing, Branko Crvenkovski, Ulisses Correia e Silva, Thomas Gibson, and Peter Steele. Among people deceased in 2008, David Foster Wallace ranks 137. Before him are Anthony Mamo, Majel Barrett, Lazare Ponticelli, Baba Amte, Ken Naganuma, and Mikel Laboa. After him are Edna Parker, Bernie Mac, Sarla Thakral, Philipp von Boeselager, Nina Foch, and Emmanuel Sanon.

Others Born in 1962

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Others Deceased in 2008

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In United States

Among people born in United States, David Foster Wallace ranks 3,764 out of 20,380. Before him are Bret Easton Ellis (1964), Laura Bridgman (1829), Orson Bean (1928), Lori Lightfoot (1962), Golden State Killer (1945), and Albert Sidney Johnston (1803). After him are Bix Beiderbecke (1903), Tiger Woods (1975), Eugene Stoner (1922), Isadore Singer (1924), Maurice Karnaugh (1924), and Jim Hall (1930).

Others born in United States

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Among WRITERS In United States

Among writers born in United States, David Foster Wallace ranks 330. Before him are Vince Gilligan (1967), Paul Gallico (1897), James Rollins (1961), Bruce Sterling (1954), Bret Easton Ellis (1964), and Laura Bridgman (1829). After him are Jim Rohn (1930), John Perkins (1945), Donna Tartt (1963), Gregory Corso (1930), Lois Lowry (1937), and Anne Applebaum (1964).

American born Writers

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