This Is Water

David Foster Wallace was an award-winning American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language... novels from 1923 to the present. Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years." Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A biography of Wallace by D. T. Max, titled Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, will be published in September 2012. Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school and Urbana High School. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics.
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