John Kennedy Toole

Critique

Toole, 1954

About the author

John Kennedy Toole

Biographical details △

Born
New Orleans, Louisiana, 1937

Died
Biloxi, Mississippi, United States,1969

Places lived
United States: New Orleans, Lafayette, New York City
Puerto Rico: Fort Buchanan

Nationality
American

Forms of writing
Novels

GEnres
Literary, humour, satire

Writing language
English

Greatest lists △

Related pages △

• A Confederacy of Dunces

Tragic life, funny writer

The story has been told many times and it's all true.

In 1976 novelist Walker Percy was teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans when he started being hounded by a woman who wanted him to read a manuscript written by her late son over a decade earlier. It was a great novel, she said. Percy tried to get rid of her but she persisted, basically stalking him, until he agreed to look at it. The manuscript was a messy carbon copy. He hoped to read just a few paragraphs before dismissing the work, but to his amazement he found himself reading on and on.

Percy helped get John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces published in 1980, and it became a publishing sensation, winning a Pulitzer Prize twelve years after the author's death.

It has also won a fanatical following since then.

The novel describes the comic adventures of a gigantically fat, intellectually twisted young man, Ignatius J. Reilly, who lives and battles with his mother. Occasionally he sallies from their apartment to take assorted jobs where he proceeds to turn everyone's life upside down. The character, said to be modelled in part on an eccentric English professor Toole knew, invites comparisons to Falstaff and Don Quixote.

A what-if life

Now, the kicker is, the grotesque novel—minus the comedy—was discovered to be somewhat autobiographical. Toole who killed himself in 1969 had worked at various jobs, considered his life a failure and was constantly at odds with his domineering, unbalanced mother.

Yes, the same mother who championed his work after his death, got him published and devoted the rest of her life to proclaiming her son's genius. In Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole, which tracks down the details of the short and hitherto little-known life, Mrs. Toole comes across as a terror who practically drove her son to suicide, although other sources are kinder to her.

With a different mother, would he have lived to produce more acclaimed literature? Would he even have written some version of that famous novel? Would it have been as good? Or better? What he would have accomplished, we'll never know.

A Confederacy of Dunces has been in development as a movie almost since the book was published, with John Belushi, John Goodman, John Candy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Will Ferrell, Chris Farley and Zach Galifianakis touted at various times to play Ignatius. (Note the high number of early deaths among the proposed leading men—which has led to fears the book is jinxed.) Forty years after publication, no film adaptation has ever reached production.

The novel was, however, adapted by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and successfully produced on stage in 2015.

An earlier and quite different novel, The Neon Bible, also unpublished during the author's life, has its avid fans too but is considered by critics an immature work of Toole's teen years. It was published in 1989 and made into a film in 1996.

— Eric

Critique