Tags
1980s, A Confederacy of Dunces, Books, Depression, failure to publish, find work, Ignatius Reilly, John Kennedy Toole, lives with mother, New Orleans, paranoia, Pulitzer Prize winner, suicide
A Confederacy of Dunces (Louisiana State University Press, 1980)
Posthumous winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, American author John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces has awed and entertained scholars, skeptics, and general scalawags for decades. This peerless and eternally hilarious novel relays the misadventures of the misanthropic Ignatius Reilly -— a thirtysomething who lives with his mother in 1960s New Orleans and struggles to find work while battling an affliction of the pyloric valve =— as well as the various trials of the colorful characters of the Quarter.
A Confederacy of Dunces was published 11 years after Toole’s 1969 suicide due to the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole’s mother. Toole was a novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose novels were rejected during his lifetime, despite that the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy. Paranoia and depression due in part to his failures to publish any of his works contributed to his suicide at the age of 31.