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. He was known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which 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. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin described Wallace as "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".

Wallace grew up in Illinois and attended Amherst College. He taught English at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. Wallace struggled with depression for many years and died by suicide in 2008, at the age of 46.

According to Goodreads, Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He aimed to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers appreciated the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness. His life, described as a map that ends at the wrong destination, showed Wallace as an A student through high school, a football and tennis player, who wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before graduating from Amherst, and went on to write critically acclaimed literature.