David Foster Wallace

John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work. John Barth, called "Jack," was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and... Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 . Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the "American high Sixties," he moved to teach at SUNY/Buffalo from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University and Johns Hopkins University before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short "realist" novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively.
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William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which won National Book Awards and one of which, The Recognitions , was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005. A collection of his essays was published posthumously in 2002 in a book... titled The Rush for Second Place. Gaddis is an important figure in and indeed one of the founding authors of American postmodern literature. His novels, because of their complexity and inventiveness in structure and style, are often considered challenging and difficult to read; for example, J R and A Frolic of His Own, both National Book Award winners, are written almost entirely in dialogue form and without much scene description, sometimes leading to confusion as to which character is speaking. Jonathan Franzen dubbed Gaddis as 'Mr. Difficult', stating that "by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety was Gaddis' nine-hundred-and-fifty-six-page first novel, The Recognitions.
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Don DeLillo is an award-winning American author, playwright, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently... lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville. DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later described how he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English.
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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pynchon is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his... fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including the fields of history, science, and mathematics. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. , The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravity's Rainbow , and Mason & Dixon . Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s. Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr.
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