Consider The Lobster

David Foster Wallace was widely regarded as one of the best writers of his generation. He wrote short stories and essays, although he is most known for his novels, including Infinite Jest (1996) and The Pale King (2011). In addition to fiction, Wallace wrote articles for a variety of publications, including “Consider the Lobster,” which he wrote for the now defunct magazine Gourmet.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, the son of a philosophy professor father and an English professor mother. He spent most of his youth in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. As a teen, he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player, an experience he later wrote about in an essay for Harper’s. He attended Amherst College where he majored in philosophy and English. His senior thesis in philosophy was published posthumously as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. The senior thesis he wrote in English became the manuscript for his first novel The Broom of the System, which was published in 1987.

Wallace began teaching college courses at Emerson and later Illinois State. By 1991, he had begun work on Infinite Jest, his second novel, which was published to great acclaim in 1996. Time later named that novel one of the 100 best English language novels written between 1923 and 2005. In 1997, he received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for a short story that had appeared in The Paris Review (and that would eventually be published in the 1999 story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) as well as a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2002, he became a professor at Pomona College while continuing to publish short stories and articles in publications such as Esquire, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and Gourmet.

Wallace is associated with postmodernism, but his writings often break the metafictional and ironic conventions of the genre. He is also known for mixing realism with deeply idiosyncratic narrations, and his work often features long, syntactically complex sentence as well as copious endnotes or footnotes. These techniques show the complexity of thought behind the narration and add a layered structure to his texts.

Throughout his writing career, Wallace struggled with depression. He committed himself to a drug and alcohol detox program in 1989 and was hospitalized at other times throughout his adult life for psychiatric episodes. One ex-girlfriend has accused him of violence and obsessive behavior. Throughout his life, antidepressant medication had allowed him to work productively, but Wallace experienced side effects. After quitting and resuming one antidepressant, Wallace hanged himself on September 12, 2008. He had written a private suicide note to his wife and arranged some of the manuscript for The Pale King, which was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Today, several universities offer seminar courses on Wallace and his writing, and his archives are now housed at the University of Texas at Austin. Two films have been made from his work or about him, 2009’s adaptation of his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and 2015’s The End of the Tour, a film based on conversations between Wallace and the author David Lipsky.