John Kennedy Toole: The Pulitzer Nobody Lived to See

The manuscript sat in a drawer for eleven years.

John Kennedy Toole wrote "A Confederacy of Dunces" in New Orleans in the early nineteen sixties, while teaching English at a local university and living in the city whose geography shaped every page. The novel is set entirely in New Orleans: the Canal Street bus lines, the French Quarter, the working-class Irish Channel neighborhood, the hot dog cart on a corner that Toole's protagonist wheels through the city with maximal indignation. The settings are precise and verifiable on a New Orleans map.

Toole submitted the manuscript to publishers repeatedly through the mid-nineteen sixties. He was rejected each time. The most significant rejection came from Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster, who corresponded with Toole for months and ultimately declined. Toole, who had moved back into his mother's house, grew increasingly depressed. In March of nineteen sixty-nine, at the age of thirty-one, he drove to Mississippi and died by suicide, leaving the manuscript with his mother, Thelma Toole.

Thelma Toole spent the next eleven years finding it a publisher. She was persistent in ways that publishers found difficult to manage. She carried the manuscript to Louisiana State University Press, where the writer Walker Percy was persuaded to read it. Percy found himself unable to stop reading. He wrote a foreword that described his experience of not being able to stop.

Louisiana State University Press published "A Confederacy of Dunces" in nineteen eighty. The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, eleven years after the author's death. Toole had never known that anyone beyond his circle had read it. The city he had written from the inside, with the particular contempt-and-love that proximity produces, outlasted the person who understood it most precisely.