The book world is reeling today from the apparent suicide of David Foster Wallace, one of America’s brightest literary stars.

The author of the acclaimed “Infinite Jest” (1996), whose verbal pyrotechnics and mordant wit earned him a cult following, was found dead at his home in California. He was 46.

“Wallace’s wife had called police saying she returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself,” Claremont police said.

“At this point in the investigation there are no signs of foul play.” In taking his own life, Wallace joins such American literary giants as Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Hunter Thompson.

The son of a University of Illinois philosophy professor, he gained public attention at the age of 24 with his ambitious 1987 debut “The Broom of the System,” which earned comparison to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.

But it was 1,079-page “Infinite Jest”, complete with over 100 pages of footnotes, that made his reputation as one of America’s greatest literary talents.

His magnum opus was set in a tennis academy and a nearby drug rehab centre in a parodic version of Organsation of North American Nations, or ONAN, where traditional calendar years were renamed after sponsoring companies to become “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” and “The Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland.” The novel centred on a lost film cartridge called “Infinite Jest” that is so entertaining that unwary viewers lost interest in everything else in life.

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 — for me, at least,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

For the last six years, Wallace had combined his literary career with teaching creative writing at Pomona College on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he wore his signature bandana to class.

Although he only had a light schedule of classes, he had taken leave this term and had not been teaching since students returned this month.

John Seery, a politics professor at Pomona College who used to work out with Wallace, said in a blog on the Huffington Post that the novelist had not been coming to the gym recently.

“I wrote him a note inquiring into his whereabouts. He wrote back and said my note cheered him. My head swirls right now. He expanded our senses of infinity and oblivion and more, much more,” Mr Seery wrote.

Wallace may have foreshadowed his own death in a 2005 speech to students at Kenyon College that spoke of the struggle with the mind.

“Think of the old cliché about quote 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,” he said.

“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.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide