David Foster Wallace Net Worth

What Was David Foster Wallace's Net Worth?

David Foster Wallace was an American author and professor who had a net worth of $5 million at the time of his death in 2008. David Foster Wallace graduated from Amherst College, and his senior thesis was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. He received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona, and he is well-known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," which "Time" magazine named one of the top 100 English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

Wallace's final unfinished novel, "The Pale King," was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He authored three novels and three short story collections, and he also published several nonfiction books. Some of his notable works include "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." Wallace passed away at the age of 46 on September 12, 2008, after hanging himself. The film "The End of the Tour" was released in 2015, with Jason Segel portraying David; the film was about a five-day road trip that author David Lipsky took with Wallace.

Early Life

David Foster Wallace was born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York. He was the son of Sally and James Wallace; his mother's maiden name was Foster. David and his younger sister, Amy, grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Sally taught English at Parkland College and was named Professor of the Year in 1996, while James taught philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Wallace attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School and Brookens Junior High School before graduating from Urbana High School in 1980. He was regionally ranked as a junior tennis player during his youth, and this period of his life inspired the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," which was published as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes" in "Harper's Magazine." His parents were atheists, but David tried to join the Catholic Church twice; however, he "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry" and later began going to a Mennonite church.

Wallace attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, majoring in philosophy and English and graduating summa cum laude in 1985. His senior thesis on the topic of philosophy and modal logic won the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize, and it was published in 2010 as "Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will." He also wrote an honors thesis in English, and he adapted it into the manuscript of 1987's "The Broom of the System," his first novel. David graduated from the University of Arizona with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in 1987, then he moved to Massachusetts to continue his philosophy studies at Harvard University's graduate school, but he left before earning his degree.

Career

"The Broom of the System" earned Wallace critical acclaim and national attention. In 1991, he was hired to teach literature at Boston's Emerson College as an adjunct professor, and the following year, he started teaching at Illinois State University's English department. David began working on "Infinite Jest," his second novel, in 1991, and it was published in 1996. In 1997, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and "The Paris Review" editors awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction to "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6," which was published in the magazine before the short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" was published in 1999. In 2009, John Krasinski directed a film adaptation of "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." He starred in the film alongside actors such as Will Arnett, Christopher Meloni, Josh Charles, Chris Messina, Will Forte, and Bobby Cannavale, and it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

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Wallace also published the short story collections "Girl with Curious Hair" (1989) and "Oblivion: Stories" (2004), and his short fiction was featured in publications such as "GQ," "Esquire," "The New Yorker," "Playboy," and "Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern." He wrote articles for "Rolling Stone," "Harper's Magazine," "Tennis," "The New York Times," "Première," "Gourmet," and "The Atlantic," and he reviewed books for the "Los Angeles Times," "The New York Times," "The Washington Post," and "The Philadelphia Inquirer." His nonfiction work was published in the collections "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (1997), "Consider the Lobster" (2005), and "Both Flesh and Not" (2012). In 2002, David moved to Claremont, California, where he served as Pomona College's first Roy E. Disney endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English. In 2005, he gave the commencement address at Kenyon College, and the speech was published as the 2009 book "This Is Water." In March of that year, a few months after Wallace's death, Little, Brown and Company announced that it planned to publish his unfinished novel, "The Pale King." His "Infinite Jest" editor, Michael Pietsch, put the novel together using notes and pages that David left behind, and it was published in April 2011. The book earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Personal Life

David met painter Karen L. Green in 2002, and they married on December 27, 2004. Wallace struggled with drug addiction, alcoholism, and depression, and he was hospitalized several times for psychiatric care. In the late '80s, he spent a month at the Massachusetts psychiatric institute McLean Hospital and completed an alcohol and drug detox program. David was in a relationship with Mary Karr, a fellow writer, in the early '90s, and she later said that David was obsessive about her. She alleged that he once threw a coffee table at her and that he tried to buy a gun to kill her ex-husband. In a 2015 interview, Mary stated, "I'm not the only woman he was violent with. It was—it's common knowledge among women who dated him, you know, that he was violent."

Death and Legacy

According to his father, Wallace had suffered from major depressive disorder for over two decades and that antidepressants helped him be productive. In mid-2007, David's doctor advised him to stop taking his primary antidepressant, phenelzine, after it was believed that the medication caused a severe interaction with food he ate at a restaurant. Wallace subsequently tried to treat his depression with electroconvulsive therapy and other treatments. On September 12, 2008, he wrote a suicide note to his wife, arranged part of "The Pale King" manuscript, and hanged himself at his home in Claremont, California, at the age of 46. Memorials for David took place at Amherst College, New York University, Pomona College, Illinois State University, and the University of Arizona. In 2010, the University of Texas at Austin purchased his personal papers and archives and put them on display at the Harry Ransom Center. In 2011, Loyola University New Orleans started offering English seminar courses on Wallace's work, and in 2014, Illinois State University's Department of English held the first David Foster Wallace Conference. In 2017, the "Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies" and the International David Foster Wallace Society were established.

Awards and Honors

In 1987, Foster won a Whiting Award in the Fiction category. "Here and There" was featured in "Prize Stories 1989: The O. Henry Awards," and "The Depressed Person" and "Good Old Neon" were included in the 1999 and 2002 editions, respectively. In 1996, David won a Lannan Literary Award (Fiction) and Salon Book Award (Fiction), and in 1997, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6" received an Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Wallace was named Illinois State University's Outstanding University Researcher in 1998 and 1999, and he had a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship from 1997 to 2000 and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in 2000. In 2012, "The Pale King" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but no prize was awarded in that category that year.

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