Jason Segel is to play David Foster Wallace in forthcoming film The End of the Tour, based on the book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.

The 2010 book was written by Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky, and is what it says on the tin: an account of a road trip with the author as he went across the US promoting his 1,100-page novel Infinite Jest, recalling the conversations the pair have and the fame that Foster Wallace is starting to experience. Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and starred in Now You See Me earlier this year, will play Lipsky.

The script is by Pulitzer-winning and Tony-nominated playwright Donald Margulies, while the director will be James Ponsoldt, whose indie romance The Spectacular Now is awaiting a UK release following acclaim in the US.

Segel, who has blended a long-running role in sitcom How I Met Your Mother with lead roles in The Five Year Engagement, The Muppets and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, recently completed the comedy Sex Tape with Cameron Diaz in which the pair frantically search for the sex tape they made the previous night.

The film is another posthumous addition to the Foster Wallace legend. He became one of the most celebrated writers in the US for his work which blended leftfield observation and pop-cultural savvy with big-hearted emotional heft, before he committed suicide in 2008.

Since then his profile has arguably grown greater, with a biography by DT Max, Every Story Is A Love Story, published last year and even his minor work reissued – his early essays on hip-hop, Signifying Rappers, were published last month. His 2005 commencement speech for Kenyon College, This Is Water, has also been widely circulated since his death.

A collection of poems by his widow Karen Green, entitled Bough Down, won praise earlier this year, and Quack This Way, a tribute from his friend Bryan A Garner was published this month.

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