Nontraditional Writer David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace, known for his literary pyrotechnics, became a star with the 1,079-page novel "Infinite Jest." (By Steve Liss -- Time Life Pictures)

"It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you've seen perform in hard-core porn . . . ." he wrote in a story collected in "Consider the Lobster and Other Essays" (2005). "That strange I-think-we've-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted."

His best-known nonfiction work, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997), is a collection of seven pieces ranging from tennis -- Mr. Wallace was a ranked junior tennis player growing up in Illinois -- to television to the fun he was supposed to have on a Caribbean luxury cruise.

The collection also includes a long article, originally written for Harper's, recounting his visit to the Illinois State Fair, where his eye for the bizarre fastened on the carnival workers. "The carnies mix with no one . . . ." he wrote. "They all have the same hard blank eyes as people in bus terminal bathrooms."

In 2000, Rolling Stone assigned him to cover the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). The candidate, he observed, was potentially "a real leader . . . somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. "

Mr. Wallace was born in Ithaca, N.Y. His father, James Donald Wallace, was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, taught English at a community college in Champaign. Both survive him.

He majored in philosophy at Amherst College, planning to teach philosophy or mathematics. He told the New York Times that during his sophomore year, a professor told him he was a genius. "It was the happiest moment in my life," he said. "I felt like I would never have to go to the bathroom again -- that I'd transcended it."

After he received his undergraduate degree in 1985, he turned his full attention to fiction writing, enrolling in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. He received his master of fine arts degree there in 1987.

Mr. Wallace taught English at Illinois State University from 1992 to 2000 and in 1997 received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

In 2002, he was named the first Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College, a liberal arts college east of Los Angeles. He usually taught one or two writing classes a semester and had developed a reputation on campus as a personable, engaging teacher.

"David was, of course, a great figure in American letters," Gary Kates, vice president and dean of the college, said in a statement. "We knew when we hired him what an accomplished writer he was, but what we had no right to expect was what a brilliant teacher he would turn out to be -- how dedicated he would be to his students and what a wonderful mentor he would be for them."