David Foster Wallace was an American writer and university instructor of English and creative writing.

Wallace delivered the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon Collegen which was published as a book, This Is Water, in 2009.

This essay covers subjects including the difficulty of Empathy, the importance of being well adjusted, and the essential lonesomeness of adult life.

David Foster Wallace struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal tendencies, with recurrent psychological depression and commitments to psychiatric wards, bouts of inappropriate sexual behavior with some of his women students.

Wallace was romantically obsessed with the writer Mary Karr, tattooing her name on his body and once considering killing her husband.

On September 12, 2008, Wallace wrote a two-page suicide note, arranged part of The Pale King mansucript, and hanged himself from a rafter of his house. He was 46.

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual.

Individualism is thus also associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles where there is a tendency towards self-creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors as so also with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.