Consider David Foster Wallace

First off, if you haven't read anything by David Foster Wallace, you owe it to yourself. Now. The literary world remembers him for his larger than life Infinite Jest, but DFW has always meant absolutely-electrically-profoundly-hysterically brilliant and empathetic journalistic essays to me.

DFW has become a cult hero in my household. I read "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (a first-person narrative of the cruise ship experience) when it was first published as "Shipping Out" in Harpers in 1996, and it remains one of the funniest things I've ever read. DFW forever changed the way I see lobsters, porn conventions, Roger Federer, talk radio, John McCain, and the way I think about observation, detail, and footnotes.

I'm not good enough a writer to begin to describe how good DFW was. Others try here, here, and here. I'm very sad that I'll never have a new DFW article to look forward to.

UPDATE: Oops, I meant to link to his well-traveled Kenyon College commencement speech.