A Confederacy of Dunces and the City That Made It Possible

Every street in "A Confederacy of Dunces" is a street you can walk. The Canal Street bus lines that Ignatius J. Reilly rides with maximal indignation, the French Quarter bars where he judges the patrons, the Pirate's Alley bookshop where the author spent hours, the working-class Irish Channel neighborhood, the office buildings of downtown: John Kennedy Toole wrote New Orleans the way Dickens wrote London, which is to say from the inside, with an eye for the social geography of class and pretension that only comes from having been formed by a place.

Toole wrote the novel in the early nineteen sixties while living with his mother in the city and teaching at a local university. He submitted it repeatedly. He was rejected repeatedly. The most sustained correspondence was with Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster, who found things in the novel to admire and ultimately declined. Toole deteriorated. In nineteen sixty-nine, at thirty-one, he died by suicide in Biloxi, Mississippi, having driven there from New Orleans.

His mother Thelma carried the manuscript for eleven years. Louisiana State University Press published it in nineteen eighty. Walker Percy, who reluctantly agreed to read it, could not stop, and said so in the foreword. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in nineteen eighty-one, twelve years after the author's death.

The argument the novel makes, underneath the comedy, is that New Orleans is a city that will outlast anyone who tries to understand it. Toole understood it as precisely as anyone has. The city proved him right.