A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Jernigan introduced David Gates as a novelist of the highest order. "Full of dark truths and biting humor," wrote Frederick Exley, "a brilliant novel [that] will be read for a long time." After that blackly comic handbook of self-destruction-whose antihero shoulders up to such crucial American figures as Bellow's Herzog, Updike's Harry Angstrom, Heller's Bob S...