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 John Kennedy Toole is celebrated as one of the quintessential voices of the South. Born in New Orleans in 1937, Toole was the only child of a domineering mother and an ailing father. He graduated with honors with a degree in English from Tulane University, and afterwards, worked briefly in a men’s clothing factory. In 1958, a timely fellowship opportunity allowed him to escape his increasingly overbearing mother and move to New York City, where he completed a Master’s degree in English Literature at Columbia University. He took a position as an assistant professor at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), but returned to New York, simultaneously pursuing a doctorate from Columbia and teaching at Hunter College. While his frustrations with his doctoral program would ultimately lead to his return to New Orleans, he found an important piece of inspiration for A Confederacy of Dunces at Hunter College; the character of Myrna Minkoff, who was based on his idealistic students.
Toole was drafted in 1961 shortly after his return to the South, and was stationed at the U. S. Army Training Center in Puerto Rico. While there, he taught English to the Spanish-speaking recruits and began working on the first draft of the novel that would become A Confederacy of Dunces. His return to New Orleans in 1963 was bittersweet; forced to support both of his parents, Toole taught at Dominican College, but spent his free time hanging around the French Quarter (allegedly helping a friend sell tamales from a cart, a direct inspiration for the character of Ignatius). During the next six years, Toole’s inability to find a publisher for his novel ultimately drove him into a depression. He began drinking heavily and eventually quit both his job at the College and his doctoral work at Tulane. John Kennedy Toole disappeared on January 20, 1969 following an argument with his mother. It is believed that he drove to the west coast, before traveling to Milledgeville, Georgia to visit the home of deceased writer Flannery O’Connor. It was during what is assumed to be a trip back to New Orleans that Toole stopped outside of Biloxi, Mississippi and committed suicide. His suicide note was destroyed by his mother, who dedicated her life to getting A Confederacy of Dunces published. She finally succeeded with the help of Walker Percy in 1980, and the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Toole’s other novel, The Neon Bible, which he wrote at the age of 16, was published in 1989.
An Almost Accidental Discovery
Excerpted from the forword to A Confederacy of Dunces by Walker Percy
While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976, I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it.
Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally and incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.
…the tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author—his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.
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