The postmodern writer David Foster Wallace was found dead in his home of an apparent suicide by hanging Friday night. Wallace, who taught creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is perhaps best known for his over 1000-page nonlinear epic novel Infinite Jest, but his body of work includes such diverse media as the personal essay (perhaps most famously "A?Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," written originally for ?Harper's Magazine, about the phenomenon of the vacation cruise) and other nonfiction.According to the New York Times, the Claremont, Calif. police reported that Wallace was found dead Friday night by his wife, Karen Green, who had just returned home.

Wallace's writings, while popular among a certain sector of the general reading public, were also adopted by academia and critics.

"All I can say is that his death is a terrible loss," said Prof. Caren Irr (ENG), who assigned "A Supposedly Fun Thing" in her class "American Literature from 1900-2000." "Personally, what I?have admired most in his writing and perhaps will admire more from here on out is the way he draws a tender irony out of otherwise earnest observations."

David Foster Wallace, referred to by fans simply as DFW, was born in Ithaca, N.Y. but grew up in central Illinois, as many Wallace fans know from reading his personal essays. Both of his parents were professors, his father a philosophy professor and his mother an English professor.

Wallace, who graduated in 1985 with a double major in English and philosophy from Amherst College, received a master's in?fine arts in creative writing in 1987 from the University of Arizona and then moved to Boston to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, which he never completed. The author had intended to pursue a career in philosophy or mathematics-his senior thesis in philosophy at Amherst, concerning modal logic, won the Gale Kennedy Memorial Prize, awarded by Amherst to philosophy majors for distinguished honors theses. After enrolling in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of Arizona, however, his novel The Broom of the System gained significant enough praise that Wallace chose to write full-time instead.

Infinite Jest, Wallace's magnum opus, was completed in 1996, during which time he was teaching at Illinois State University. The following year, Wallace was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, administered by the Paris Review, for one of the title stories of his collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

That collection, which was eventually published in full in 1999, is the basis for an upcoming film directed by John Krasinski, best known for his role as Jim on NBC's The Office. Though the film began production in 2006, it does not have a set release date but is reported to star Julianne Nicholson and include performances by Death?Cab for Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard, The Office's Rashida Jones, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit's Christopher Meloni and Saturday Night Live's Will Forte, among others.

Wallace's last published work is a reworking of an essay written in 2000 about John?McCain's presidential campaign. The 2008 edition is titled McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.

Said Professor Irr, "He was a brilliant, daring and frequently wise writer. It's especially sad when a great comic voice disappears; there's far too little comedy as it is.