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John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans in 1937. He received a master's degree in English from Columbia University and taught at Hunter College and at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early sixties and tried unsuccessfully to get the novel published; depressed, at least in part by his failure to place the book, he committed suicide in 1969. It was only through the tenacity of his mother that her son's book was eventually published and found the audience it deserved. His long-suppressed novel The Neon Bible, written when he was only sixteen, was eventually published as well. A Confederacy of Dunces won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Toole committed suicide at the age of 32 and never saw this acclaimed novel in print. He wrote it in the early 1960s, but at the time it was rejected by publishers; his mother's unerring faith in its calibre led her to find it an audience in 1980, and in 1981, 12 years after the author's death, it won the Pulitzer Prize. In the vastly fat, bilious, self-important sloth Ignatius J. Reilly, he created an intelligent, repulsive monster, a prophet who speaks of mankind's decline since the Middle Ages, who believes that only with the return of 'theology and geometry' will man's redemption be secured. This is bigger and darker than comedy; in the slapstick of Ignatius's abuse of his body, his mother, and the whole world, in the bitter invective that spews from his mouth against a century gone wrong, and in the diminutive characters that litter his New Orleans, Toole presents a 'commedia' which we are lucky to have. (Kirkus UK)
