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After four decades, the peerless wit and indulgent absurdity of A Confederacy of Dunces continues to attract new readers.
Though the manuscript was rejected by many publishers during John Kennedy Toole's lifetime, his mother successfully published the book years after her son's suicide, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This literary underdog and comic masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in over two dozen languages.
A Confederacy of Dunces features one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed "slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens.
The genius of A Confederacy of Dunces is reaffirmed as successive generations embrace this extravagant satire. Adulation for Toole's comic epic remains as intense today as it was at the time of its initial publication.
"Crazy magnificent once-in-a-blue-moon first novel... . There is a touch of genius about Toole and what he has created." ―Publishers Weekly
"The novel can hardly contain burstingly funny Ignatius―and the mix of high and low comedy is almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic." ―Kirkus Reviews
"To the charms of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, I succumbed, stunned and seduced, page after page, vocal with delight... . A pungent work of slapstick, satire, and intellectual incongruities." ―New York Times
This information about A Confederacy of Dunces was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans in 1937 and died in 1969. After graduating from Tulane University, he received a master's degree from Columbia University and taught at Hunter College, the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and Dominican College. Much of the first draft of A Confederacy of Dunces was written while he was in the army, stationed in Puerto Rico and teaching English to new recruits.
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