Author David Foster Wallace, seen here during the New Yorker Magazine Festival in New York in 2002, first gained attention in 1987 for The Broom of the System. (Keith Bedford/Getty)

David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his home in California, according to police. He was 46.

Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. local time Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.

Wallace taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College.

Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System, gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition and offbeat humour.

The New York Times said the 24-year-old author "attempts to give us a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok."

Published in 1996, Infinite Jest cemented Wallace's reputation as a major American literary figure. The 1,000-plus-page tome, praised for its complexity and dark wit, topped many best-of lists.

In a review of the book, author Jay McInerney described it as "something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola."

Michael Pietsch, who edited Infinite Jest, hailed Wallace as "a writer who other writers looked to with awe."

"He wrote showstoppers," Pietsch told the New York Times. "He was brilliantly funny. People stayed with these long, complicated novels because they made them laugh."

Time magazine named Infinite Jest in its issue of the "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005."

Brought a 'sense of play' to storytelling

"He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," New York Times book editor David Ulin told the Los Angeles Times.

'He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling...'—New York Times books editor David Ulin

"He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late '80s and early 1990s."

He followed up Infinite Jest with other collections of fiction and nonfiction, including Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999), Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003) and Oblivion (2004).

Wallace received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997.

Wallace’s latest book was a paperback version of his 2000 Rolling Stone magazine profile of Republican presidential contender John McCain, titled McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.

"McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now," he told the Wall Street Journal.

His short fiction was published in Esquire, GQ, Harper's, The New Yorker and the Paris Review. He wrote nonfiction for a number of publications, including an essay on the U.S. Open for Tennis magazine and a profile of the director David Lynch for Premiere.

First majored in philosophy

Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Wallace attended Amherst College, majoring first in philosophy before switching to creative writing at the University of Arizona.

He graduated with master's of fine arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and began teaching writing at Illinois State University in Normal in 1993.

Wallace was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College in 2002.

His father, James Donald Wallace, was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and his mother taught English at a community college in Champaign, Ill.

Wallace gave an indication of the kind of demons he was fighting in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio:

"Think of the old cliché about … the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

"This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."

A memorial is being planned at Pomona College.