John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist whose posthumously published masterpiece is one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. Born in New Orleans in 1937, he studied at Tulane and Columbia and served in the US Army. He struggled for years to get his novel published. A Confederacy of Dunces follows Ignatius J. Reilly, a slothful, flatulent, medievalist intellectual rampaging through 1960s New Orleans — one of the most unforgettable comic characters in American fiction. The novel was published eleven years after Toole's death by suicide, after his mother brought the manuscript to the novelist Walker Percy. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Toole died in 1969. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers one of the funniest novels ever written — a comic masterpiece saved from obscurity by a mother's determination.