that? Nothing much did. And I wrote a few other books equally as promising. As I wrote I was learning to write (having not gone to school) and I was learning what not to write as well. I also finally figured out that I was writing the kind of books I thought other people wanted to read, not the kind I wanted to write. That’s when Big Fish happened, and why it was a breakthrough for me. As a child he loved the science fiction novel Dune, by Frank Herbert. Wallace lists his favorite writers as Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Faulkner. Wallace also loves the novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr Bridge by Evan S. Connell. Wallace was awarded the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer of the Year in 2019. 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 a 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 creating 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. Bibliography Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998) Ray in Reverse (2000) The Watermelon King (2003) ''O Great Rosenfeld!(2005) O Great Rosenfeld! Part the 2 (2005) Off the Map (2005) Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007) The Kings and Queens of Roam (2013) Extraordinary Adventures(2017) References External links Wallace's website Inventory of the Daniel Wallace Papers, 1977–2007, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill Strange Horizons interview Independent Weekly interview Southern Literary Review interview USAToday interview 1959 births Living people 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American male novelists American agnostics Writers from Birmingham, Alabama People from Chapel Hill, North Carolina Novelists from North Carolina Emory University alumni University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty 20th-century