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Be prepared to read the phrase "the greatest writer of his generation" several times in the next couple of days: As hard as this may be to believe, novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, 46, hanged himself.

At a time when finger-waggers were bemoaning TV, video games and the Internet for turning language into a series of grunts and emoticons, he penned a 1,000-page tome ("Infinite Jest") about a culture addicted to distraction. In the mid-90s, when social critics were bemoaning hip-hop as cultural dreck, he co-authored the book "Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present."

While fans considered his labyrinthine prose the work of an unstoppable mind and critics slogged it as narcissistic, perhaps one of the most concise nuggets about Wallace was dropped a few years ago by one of his students on RateMyProfessors.com: "David Foster Wallace is not for everyone -- but he's a trip! He's like no one else you'll ever meet! He's flawed, but overall? Great! Dave F. Wallace rocks!"

In the following clip, Wallace spoke briefly about the inspirations for his works. Click to read an excerpt from one of his speeches.




Several obituaries mention that Wallace referenced suicide in his 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College. But another section from that speech may be more revealing about his psyche:

"In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

"If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

"They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing."