Novelist, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. His novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), published 11 years after he committed suicide, won critical acclaim, and was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. The Neon Bible was published in 1989.
John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best known for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces.
No work of Toole's was published during his lifetime. (Toole committed suicide.) After his death his mother brought the manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces to the attention of the novelist Walker Percy, who ushered the book into print.
Life
Toole's childhood in Uptown New Orleans was rather sheltered, dominated by his mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, who seldom let her only child play with other children.
After earning an undergraduate degree from Tulane University, Toole received a master's degree at Columbia University, and spent a year as assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now UL Lafayette) in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Toole's next academic post was in New York, where he taught at Hunter College.
After his time in the military, Toole returned to New Orleans to live with his parents and teach at Dominican College.
Toole sent the manuscript of his novel to Simon and Schuster. Some friends and relatives of Toole disagree with suggestions that Toole was a homosexual, including David Kubach, a longtime friend who also served with Toole in the army.
The authors of the first biography of Toole to be published were not acquainted with him, and "not knowing him makes a big difference", Kubach said. thesis, "The Nihilistic Perspective of John Kennedy Toole," (2000, California State University, Dominguez Hills) posits that Toole's novels are a mirror of the author's life, reflect his bleak view of human existence, and convey Toole's despair over the human condition.
Toole committed suicide on March 26, 1969, after disappearing from New Orleans, by putting one end of a garden hose into the exhaust pipe of his car and the other into the window of the car in which he was sitting.
Works
After his death, Toole's mother insisted that author Walker Percy read the manuscript for Dunces.
Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, and the book has sold more than 1.5 million copies in 18 languages.
Toole's only other novel is The Neon Bible, which he wrote at age 16 and considered too juvenile a writing attempt to submit for publication while he was alive.
A statue of Toole's most famous character, Ignatius J.
Bibliography
Novels by Toole:
A Confederacy of Dunces, (LSU Press, 1980).Works about Toole:
Ronald W. Bell, "The Nihilistic Perspective of John Kennedy Toole," (California State University [Dominguez Hills] Ph.D.
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