This is Water

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York. His father James taught philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while his mother Sally taught English at Parkland College. His penchant for philosophy was apparent by age 14, when he and his father read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together. Upon moving to Amherst College in the 1980s, Wallace was quickly identified as a prodigious philosophical student and unrelenting researcher. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst in 1985 with majors in English and philosophy. He focused on modal logic and mathematics as branches of philosophy and received the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize for his senior thesis, which was published posthumously as “Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will” in 2011 (Lipsky, David. “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.” Rolling Stone, 20 Sept. 2019).

Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), was based on his honors English thesis. He found the writing experience laborious, feeling that it consumed too much of him. That same year, Wallace earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Two years later, he enrolled at Harvard to study philosophy but soon dropped out (Lipsky). In the 1990s, Wallace held various teaching positions, including at Emerson College, the University of Illinois, and Pomona College. His many professional honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and an appointment on the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. In addition to those honors, Time magazine ranks “This Is Water” as one of the top 10 commencement speeches ever given.

Wallace was a literary celebrity by the time he delivered “This Is Water.” He gained relative acclaim for his works before Infinite Jest but was thrust into the public eye after the novel’s publication and a 10-city book tour with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky. This transition was not easy, and Wallace struggled with the effects of his success. When asked about Infinite Jest in a 1996 Salon interview, he said: “The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift” (Miller, Laura. “David Foster Wallace.” Salon, 9 Mar. 1996).

Wallace battled with alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicidal tendencies for years. In 1989, he spent four weeks in a detox program for drug and alcohol addiction, and he would undergo electroconvulsive therapy and take various prescription drugs to treat his depression (Max). His sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, recalls a moment with her brother after he unexpectedly returned home from Amherst:

he would just talk about loneliness and wondering how people get up every day and function. At the time, I think I was working at Baskin-Robbins, and he said, ‘How do you do that? When somebody comes in the store and asks for an ice cream, how do you do that and not run out the back door?’ (Wallace-Havens, Amy. “My Big Brother, David Foster Wallace.” The World, 23 Aug. 2015).

Anxiety and existential crisis pervaded Wallace’s life and works, including “This Is Water.” He was no stranger to the internal struggles of day-to-day living, even with all his success. By 2007, he was advised by his doctor to stop taking phenelzine, an antidepressant drug, and his depression returned. He attempted other treatments, but they proved unsuccessful (Max). Wallace took his own life on September 12, 2008, at the age of 46. His literary celebrity and personal legacy live on through public archives held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies and the David Foster Wallace Society were started in 2017. Universities across the country offer curriculums on his body of work, and a DFW conference is held annually to promote the study of his writing.