The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace.
His last novel, The Pale King , was published in 2011..
He died in 2008.
He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers\' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair , Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I\'ll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster .
His second novel, Infinite Jest , was published in 1996.
He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University.
He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System , as his senior English thesis.
About the Author: David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player.
Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.
It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life\'s meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace\'s unique gifts.
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace\'s death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook.
And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling.
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace
