Perspective

David Foster Wallace is a native of Illinois, but Wallace left the Midwest to attend college at Amherst in Massachusetts. Wallace later receives a Master in Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona and studies briefly at Harvard. These travels leave Wallace feeling more like an Easterner than a Midwesterner, a theme which he explores when he returns to Illinois to cover the Illinois State Fair for Harper's Magazine.

Wallace is by his own admission an agoraphobe and dislikes interaction with most people. In order to gather material for stories, Wallace must go through extensive psychological preparation and take multiple breaks from crowds. This social handicap frequently make Wallace's interactions with people in his articles awkward and even painful. Although Wallace dislikes people in general in the abstract, there are some groups of people and individuals that Wallace singles out for specific criticism. For instance...