With parents like this, only one thing you will become, a writer

David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each
other Ulysses in bed while holding hands.

Jim read his son David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story, when they were both knee high to a grasshopper.

By the time he was 11, David Foster Wallace was mowingn the lawn for one of his father's associate
Professors, the deal being the 11 year old David would mow the Professor's lawna and in return the Professon would give him a one to one on Hegel and Nietzsche.

It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to be a writer but it seem eh...possible.,


For Jim (Dad) was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois;
Sally (Mum)taught English at a community college, and at home with her children
was what her son in his fiction would term a ‘militant grammarian’,
 constantly monitoring their usage and syntax, turning it into a game.

So David Foster Wallace’s (the son of the literary parents) became a creature of university
campuses: Champaign-Urbana as a child; Amherst for college; Tucson for his MFA
at the University of Arizona; back to Amherst to teach fiction writing; Cambridge,
Massachusetts, for a stint as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard,
then teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be
close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois
State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California.

In effect was an academic gypsy.

Later through his novels he would become famous;  he became a celebrity literary figure in New York and was lionised by the New York literati as if he were an icon.

So where did all this erudition lead?

David Foster Wallace killed himself
in 2008 at the age of 46.