Works by
John Kennedy Toole
(Writer)
[1937 - 1969]

• A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) -- Winner 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  "A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of the writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and Toole's mother, quickly becoming a cult classic. Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. It is an important part of the 'modern canon' of Southern literature.

  The title derives from the book's epigraph by Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." (Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting)

  The story is set in the city of New Orleans in the early 1960s. The central character is Ignatius J. Reilly, an intelligent but slothful man still living with his mother in Uptown New Orleans, who, because of family circumstances, must set out to get a job for the first time in his life at age thirty. In his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters." -- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• The Neon Bible (1989)
  John Kennedy Toole--who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces--wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.
  
  The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.

See also:

• Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors (1999)
  by Mark Seinfelt
  Some of the greatest writers in the world chose an untimely death by suicide, and this charts their lives and psychological conditions. It's hard to easily categorize this treatise, which considers both their literary lives and their psychology; but any studying such writers from Anne Sexton and Ernest Hemingway to the more modern Michael Dorris, will find Final Draft an important survey covering more than a century of literary figures.

• Ken & Thelma: The Story Of A Confederacy Of Dunces (2005) by Joel L. Fletcher
  John Kennedy Toole’s first published novel, "A Confederacy of Dunces," which Walker Percy called a "gargantuan tumultuous human tragi-comedy," became a publishing phenomenon, with almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages. The book’s outrageous protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, is an icon of contemporary American fiction.
  
  Now "Ken and Thelma" sheds new light on the tragic life story of the author, known as "Ken" to his friends. Drawing on his own journals and personal letters, Joel L. Fletcher recreates his friendship with Ken in the early 1960s and his long association with Ken’s indomitable mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, after the book’s publication. "Ken and Thelma" features personal photographs, many never before published.

• Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole (2001) by Deborah George Hardy and Rene Pol Nevils
  The phenomenal success of John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is now legendary, a story that has long beckoned a deeper exploration into the life, imagination, and demise of the writer responsible for one of American literature’s most memorable characters—Ignatius J. Reilly. In Ignatius Rising, René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy present the first biography of Toole, drawing upon scores of interviews with contemporaries of the writer and acquaintances of his influencing mother, Thelma, as well as unpublished letters, documents, and photographs. Frank yet sympathetic, Ignatius Rising deftly describes a life that is dark, tragic, bizarre, and amazing—but luminous with the gift of laughter, a life not unlike those of Toole’s beloved characters, now loved the world over.