Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| A Confederacy of Dunces | 1980 |
| The Neon Bible | 1989 |
About John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole (1937 to 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans whose comic novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” was published in 1980, eleven years after his death, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. His only other novel, “The Neon Bible”, written when he was 16, followed in 1989.
Toole was born in New Orleans on 17 December 1937. His father sold cars and his mother, Thelma, gave private lessons in music, speech and dramatic expression; with her encouragement he was performing comic impressions on stage at the age of ten. He took a bachelor’s degree at Tulane University on a scholarship and an MA in English literature at Columbia University, then taught at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, at Hunter College in New York and later at St. Mary’s Dominican College in New Orleans.
His studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the army and sent to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to teach English to Spanish-speaking recruits. There he began “A Confederacy of Dunces”, finishing it at his parents’ home after his discharge. The novel follows Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, overweight, self-styled scholar of thirty who lives with his mother in early 1960s New Orleans and whose search for work brings him up against a cast of French Quarter characters. Its title comes from an epigram by Jonathan Swift.
Toole sent the manuscript to Simon & Schuster, where the editor Robert Gottlieb thought him talented but asked for revisions and was never satisfied with the result. Toole eventually shelved the book. Suffering from depression and feelings of persecution, he left home in January 1969, and on 26 March he died by suicide outside Biloxi, Mississippi, aged 31.
His mother spent five years sending the novel to publishers, all of whom rejected it. In 1976 she pressed it on the novelist Walker Percy, then teaching at Loyola University New Orleans, who championed it for more than three years until Louisiana State University Press published it in 1980 with his foreword. The first printing was 2,500 copies; the book went on to sell more than 1.5 million in 18 languages. “The Neon Bible”, a coming-of-age story narrated by a boy named David in rural Mississippi, was published by Grove Press in 1989 and filmed by Terence Davies in 1995.