John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans in 1937, the only child of parents who were alternately devoted and suffocating in the particular way of certain Southern families. He was a gifted student — reading at an unusually early age, finishing college at Tulane at seventeen, completing a PhD at Columbia — and possessed of a comic sensibility so acute that the people around him described his conversation as a sustained performance. He taught English, served in the Army, and wrote.

The novel he wrote in the early 1960s, A Confederacy of Dunces, centers on Ignatius J. Reilly, a monstrous, flatulent, medieval-minded sloth living with his mother in New Orleans, who wages continuous war against modernity from the comfort of his bedroom. Ignatius is one of the great comic creations in American fiction — simultaneously ridiculous and devastating, a figure whose contempt for everything around him is both the joke and the indictment. The novel is set entirely in New Orleans, and Toole renders the city — its neighborhoods, its dialects, its social hierarchies, its particular mixture of grandeur and decay — with the precision of someone who knew it from the inside.

Toole submitted the manuscript to Simon & Schuster, where it entered an extended correspondence with editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb found much to admire but ultimately concluded the novel didn't come together as a whole and declined to publish it. The rejection, and the inability to place it elsewhere, contributed to a depression Toole could not escape. In March 1969, at thirty-one, he drove to Biloxi, Mississippi, parked near a cemetery, and died by suicide.

His mother, Thelma Toole, refused to accept the novel's obscurity. For eleven years after his death she carried the manuscript from publisher to publisher. She finally approached Walker Percy at Loyola University in 1976, presenting herself as a fan who wanted his opinion of her son's work. Percy agreed reluctantly, intending to find a polite reason to decline. He started reading the manuscript expecting incompetence and discovered, as he later wrote, that he could not put it down. His endorsement persuaded Louisiana State University Press to publish the novel in 1980. A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, a year after publication. It has never been out of print.

The Neon Bible, a spare and melancholy novel Toole wrote at sixteen, was published posthumously in 1989. It is apprentice work — interesting as document, minor as art. The two novels together are what survive: one masterpiece and one juvenilum.

The gap between Toole's death and his fame has made his story one of the most discussed and most painful in American letters. The questions it raises are partly biographical — what drove the despair, whether the rejections were definitive or whether his mother's account has been simplified — and partly institutional: how many works of comparable quality have stayed in drawers, and how many Thelma Tooles have not existed to retrieve them. The Pulitzer came twelve years too late for Toole to know about it. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans, in the city whose voice he caught precisely.