Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 "Call Me Dave" -- ch. 2 "The Real `Waller'" -- ch. 3 "Westward!" -- ch. 4 Into the Funhouse -- ch. 5 "Please Don't Give Up on Me" -- ch. 6 "Unalone and Unstressed" -- ch. 7 "Roars and Hisses" -- ch. 8 The Pale King.

In his lifetime, David Foster Wallace was lauded by critics and loved by fans. But even to those who had barely read his work, he was something of a cult figure. Since his suicide in 2008, Wallace has become the Kurt Cobain of the printed word, and his life and death now stand as symbols of a generation's hopes and their despair. In this compelling account of Wallace's evolution from anxious adolescent into post-modern anti-hero, D. T. Max will speak to those who knew him intimately and those who were drawn to him from afar to tell the story of a man struggling to write authentically about "what it is to be a fucking human being" against the frenetic noise of modern life and the cavernous void of American culture. This is a story of drugs and depression, of madness and creativity intertwined, of a man who felt profoundly lost but still found a way to capture this lostness in words and hold it defiantly aloft, like a flag for his generation.