David Foster Wallace (1962 2008) was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where in his teens he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. His works include Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, A Supposedly Fun Thing I ll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. His final novel, The Pale King, was posthumously published in 2011.
John Jeremiah Sullivan is one of America s leading practitioners of the long-form magazine profile, with work appearing in The New York Times Magazine (where he is a staff writer), Harper s (of which he is a contributing editor), The New Yorker, New York, Oxford American, GQ, and other magazines. He is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of Sportswriter s Son and Pulphead.