In Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, a sympathetic and engrossing biography of David Foster Wallace, literary journalist D.T. Max deftly outlines the early years of the writer’s life, from his birth in Ithaca, New York, growing up in Champaign, Illinois, where he became a promising junior tennis player, to his education (with a double major in English and philosophy) at Amherst College. The novel he wrote for his senior thesis, The Broom of the System, was published when Wallace was 25 years old, launching a career that went on to see creation of a range of exceptional works of fiction and nonfiction.