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“When a true genius appears in the
world, You may know him by this sign, that the dunces Are
all in confederacy against him.”—Jonathan Swift,
“Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”
“A green hunting cap squeezed the
top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full
of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew
in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn
signals indicating two directions at once.”
So enters one of the most memorable characters
in American fiction, Ignatius J. Reilly. John Kennedy Toole’s
hero is one, “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a
latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter.
His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens
of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life
dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures”
(Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
Ignatius J. Reilly is a flatulent frustrated
scholar deeply learned in Medieval philosophy and American
junk food, a brainy mammoth misfit imprisoned in a trashy
world of Greyhound Buses and Doris Day movies. He is in violent
revolt against the entire modern age. Ignatius’ peripatetic
employment takes him from Levy Pants, where he leads a workers’
revolt, to the French Quarter, where he waddles behind a hot
dog wagon that serves as his fortress.
A Confederacy of Dunces is an
American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem
gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts
into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes
department store. The characters leave the city and literature
forever marked by their presences—Ignatius and his mother;
Mrs. Reilly’s matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss
Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants;
inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage
dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift,
Dickens—their spirits are all here. Filled with unforgettable
characters and unbelievable plot twists, shimmering with intelligence,
and dazzling in its originality, Toole’s comic classic
just keeps getting better year after year.
Released by Louisiana State University
Press in April 1980 and published in paperback in 1981 by
Grove Press, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short
of a publishing phenomenon. Turned down by countless publishers
and submitted by the author’s mother years after his
suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Today, there are over 1,500,000 copies in print worldwide
in eighteen languages.
John Kennedy Toole was born in
New Orleans in 1937. He received a master’s degree in
English from Columbia University and taught at Hunter and
the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In 1969, frustrated
at his failure to interest a publisher in A Confederacy of
Dunces, he committed suicide. Toole’s book was eventually
published, after his mother brought the work to the attention
of Walker Percy and insisted that he read her son’s
manuscript. Percy became one of the novel’s many admirers
and The Confederacy of Dunces would eventually be awarded
the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Following that posthumous success,
The Neon Bible, which Toole had written when he was
sixteen, was first published in 1989.
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