As a ranked junior tennis player, David Foster Wallace found the Midwest wind to be his friend.

The wind, coupled with having grown up in what he later described as his mathematically "boxed township of Illinois farmland," helped make him what he called a "near-great tennis player" between the ages of 12 and 15.

Mr. Wallace, the son of University of Illinois philosophy Professor emeritus James Wallace and retired Parkland College Professor of English Sally Foster Wallace of Urbana, eventually abandoned competitive tennis to become a brilliant, prodigious and virtuoso writer, hailed as one of the best of his generation.

His apparent suicide by hanging on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif., has left the literary world and his family stunned and grieving.

Mr. Wallace, who was 46, had struggled with depression since his undergraduate days at Amherst College, where he majored in English and philosophy, said his mother. Their son had been severely depressed for months, and he was on medical leave this semester from Pomona College, where he took, in 2001, the newly endowed Roy Edward Disney chair.

"It's been a long battle and he was very, very brave," his mother said Monday before breaking into tears.

"He was a terrific kid," she added.

James Wallace told The News-Gazette that their son – the older of the Wallaces' two children and a 1980 graduate of Urbana High School – had been "just a very curious, lively child." His parents didn't realize how smart he was until he was in high school.

His classmates were asking about his father's profession, and Mr. Wallace told his father, "Dad, I'm embarrassed. I don't know what philosophy is." His father suggested that he read a work by Plato and then the two would discuss it.

"I never encountered a student who caught on as fast as he did," James Wallace said. "I was just astonished."

Sally Foster Wallace remembers how she and her son would rise at 5 a.m. each day to read a chapter of "Ulysses" together.

"He was dazzling," she said.

She also called him "a sweet, sweet, sweet person." So did Robert McLaughlin, a professor of English at Illinois State University, where Mr. Wallace taught from 1993 to 2001 and was beloved by students and colleagues.

"He was very considerate," McLaughlin added. "He was just always fun to be around and do things with. He was usually easy to be with. He had moments when he would be prickly. He was very smart and could be competitive in ways that academics are."

Mr. Wallace had first come to literary attention at age 24, when he was a student in writing at the University of Arizona and his first novel, "The Broom of the System," was published as a leading title in Penguin's Contemporary American Fiction Series. It brought him comparisons to heavyweights Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

Mr. Wallace, who also wrote short stories and essays – Bruce Weber of The New York Times described him as a "versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy" – was best known, though, for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest" (Little, Brown), "a 1,079-page monster that perceives American society as self-obsessed, pleasure-obsessed and entertainment-obsessed," Weber wrote in the obituary published Monday in the Times.

ISU's McLaughlin said that for Mr. Wallace, writing novels was a struggle.

"He was very creative, very self-critical; the more he got into a long piece, the more he would question himself about it," he said. "It's so sad to think we won't be getting anything else from him.

"For those of us who are interested in postmodernism and experimental literature and what the next step is, he is central. He was very self-consciously trying to find ways to simultaneously make use of the self-referentiality of post-modern writers and to get beyond that to say real things about the real world. That is very much the challenge of this generation of authors, and no one faced it more intelligently or bravely than he did."

McLaughlin said ISU is considering a memorial event for Mr. Wallace. His parents do not yet know whether services will take place here.

Other survivors include his sister, Amy Wallace Havens of Tucson, and his wife of nearly four years, Karen Green, a visual artist.