Daniel Wallace (1959- ) is an author who is best known for his novel Big Fish (1998), a national bestseller that was developed into a major motion picture directed by Tim Burton. In addition to his four novels, Wallace has written and illustrated a children's book, Elynora, and has published more than three dozen short stories in publications such as The Massachusetts Review, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Short Stories. His illustrations and drawings have appeared in the L.A. Times and Italian Vanity Fair.


In 2000, Wallace published his second novel, Ray in Reverse. Set in the South, Ray in Reverse relates the tragedies and triumphs of the main characters life in reverse, from his death to his childhood. In 2003, Wallace revisited the town of Ashland, made famous in Big Fish, with his longest novel, The Watermelon King, primarily a work based on local traditions in the rural South that connect with universal myth through the scapegoating of a community member in order to bring about rebirth and renewal. Wallace's fourth novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, was released in 2007. Similar to his previous novels, the novel is set in the South and explores the relationship between a mother and a son and the differences between real magic and sleight of hand. That same year, he wrote and illustrated a children's book, O Great Rosenfeld!, that was published in France and Korea and the following year published another children's book, Elynora, in Italy. Throughout this time, Wallace continued to write and published several short stories as well as a number of illustrations. He also wrote an unproduced screenplay called "Timeless" for Universal Pictures. A Broadway musical based on Big Fish premiered in fall 2013 but closed in fewer than three months. In May 2013, Wallace published the novel The Kings and Queens of Roam, a fantasy novel about two sisters in the magical town of Roam. Well received, it has been called an adult "fairy tale" by a number of critics. He published Extraordinary Adventures, a novel loosely based on his own life in Birmingham, in 2017.
All of Wallace's novels are set in Alabama and the South; however, he does not consider himself necessarily a southern writer. The South was a convenient and familiar place in which to set his novels because that is where he has lived most of his life. Setting for Wallace is not a defining feature of his novels, however, but rather serves as a place in which the characters can interact. The genre to which his works can most accurately be ascribed is magical realism. His work explores subjects through light and funny scenarios with more serious or sinister undertones. The major themes of his novels include southernness, parent-child relationships, mythology, and magical realism.
In spite of his success as a writer, Wallace never read much as a child or young adult. He cites Kurt Vonnegut as his primary influence, particularly Breakfast of Champions. Other influences include William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. D. Salinger. As a writer, Wallace concerns himself more with entertaining himself and his audience than producing works of art solely for the sake of art.
In 2008, Wallace returned to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed his Bachelor of Arts in English. He currently lives in Chapel Hill with his wife, Laura Kellison Wallace, and teaches creative writing as the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at Chapel Hill.
Works by Daniel Wallace
Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998)
Ray in Reverse (2000)
The Watermelon King (2003)
Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007)
O Great Rosenfeld! (2007)
Elynora (2008)
The Kings and Queens of Roam (2013)
Extraordinary Adventures (2017)
Additional Resources
Turner, Daniel Cross. "The Magical Work of Fiction: An Interview with Daniel Wallace." storySouth 27 (April 2008); http://www.storysouth.com/2009/03/interview-with-daniel-wallace.html.