Daniel Wallace

Daniel Wallace (born 1959) is an American author. He is best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions. His other books include Ray in Reverse and The Watermelon King. His stories have also been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Life

Wallace was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and he has three sisters. He attended Emory University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying English and philosophy. His first job was as a veterinary assistant cleaning cages. Wallace did not graduate from college until May 2008, instead taking a job with a trading company in Nagoya, Japan. He currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife and son.

Wallace states, of his childhood, that "I was completely average in every way. My childhood was the most uneventful part of my life, I think." He reports, however, that there was friction within his family, as in an interview he states:

My father wanted me to work with him in his company, an import/export firm, and to that end I lived in Japan for a couple of years. But it didn’t work out. It didn’t make me happy and the truth is I wasn’t that good at it. I wouldn’t have been a good businessman. I tried. So I quit – or, if he were alive and you could ask him, fired – and started writing. He wasn’t for it but then it’s hard to support a child in an endeavor for which he has shown absolutely no promise. My mother loved the idea of it because being a writer is such a romantic idea and because it hurt my father, and if he was hurt she was happy. A running motif in his works are glass eyes; Wallace has stated in numerous interviews (including the one published in the back of the paperback edition of Big Fish) that he collects glass eyes. He continued to live in Chapel Hill with his wife, Laura, a social worker, In a 2011 article for Pure Movies, he wrote about how absurd he found it that Big Fish was the book that was adapted into a film when all his others have clearer narrative structures. His other books include Ray in Reverse, The Watermelon King, and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. His short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Wallace believes that "art is a distillation of experience." He believes that "writing requires only a pen and paper, and not paint, brushes, canvases, nor expensive film or photographic equipment, so it’s seen as something ‘anyone can do.’"

Teaching career

Wallace currently is a professor and lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. About his career as a teacher, Wallace has stated:

Teaching undergraduates is much different than teaching graduate or post-graduate students. My job is to foster an appreciation for the art of writing. Showing a student what’s behind the curtain, so he’ll at least be able to see and appreciate these things when he reads a book. If he chooses to write himself – and of course, very few undergraduates pursue writing beyond this level – he knows some of the very basic devices used to creat a compelling story. Rarely does a student leave our program homogenized: even if that were something we wanted to do, we just don’t have them long enough. This Isn't Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew (2023) Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars: Stories (2025)