DAVID FOSTER Wallace was not necessarily the "literary voice of Generation X", as he was once billed, but he wrote perhaps his generation's most audacious novel, and was a throwback to the excitement of the early postmodernist metafictions of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo or John Barth.
His death, at the age of 46, apparently by his own hand, came as a shock in US literary circles, although he confessed in interviews to having undergone a "suicide scare" 20 years earlier.
In his best-known novel, Infinite Jest (1996), three of the main characters, the Incandenza Brothers, labour under the shadow of their father's suicide, a failure of his communication with them.
Infinite Jest was Wallace's second novel. His first, The Broom of the System (1987), grew out of his thesis in English at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he also majored in philosophy.
Wallace's novels are laced with irony, often delivered through extensive footnotes accommodating epic diversions. This ironic mode balances loftier themes with the more mundane concerns of popular culture: in Infinite Jest, virtually every aspect of life in North America has been taken over by corporate sponsors.
Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, where his father James was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at Cornell University. James Wallace became a renowned professor at the University of Illinois, while David's mother Sally taught literature at a community college.
David followed in his father's footsteps to Amherst. He received a master's degree in writing from the University of Arizona in 1987, and began studying for a PhD in philosophy at Harvard, but left before completing the degree.
Although he had published a novel and some short stories and, in 1987, won the Whiting Writers' Award, by the end of the 1980s Wallace's life was in a downward spiral which included at least one stay in a psychiatric hospital. He later characterised his generation as being full of people like himself, "successful, obscenely well-educated, and sort of adrift".
In 1991 he began working on Infinite Jest. "I wanted to do something sad," he said, "real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium." The following year, he moved to Normal to teach at Illinois State University.
Although he finished it in 1993, his massive manuscript was cut by almost a third and was published only in 1996. Despite, or perhaps because of, its size, it was a massive hit, and Wallace was rewarded with a MacArthur "genius" grant and Lannan prize.
But success created another problem; this cult writer described himself as "agoraphobic".
In 2002 he moved to California, where a lighter teaching load at Pomona College allowed him more privacy and time to pursue journalistic projects. He wrote about David Lynch for Premiere, holiday cruises for Harper's, the US Open for Tennis magazine, and covered John McCain's 2000 campaign for Rolling Stone. The McCain article was expanded into a book, McCain's Promise, released just a few days before the writer's death.
Although he published two collections of short stories after Infinite Jest, he went 12 years without producing another novel.
• David Foster Wallace: born February 21st, 1962; died September 12th, 2008