A Confederacy of Dunces

Front Cover
Penguin, 2000 - Classical fiction - 338 pages
A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. In magnificent revolt against the twentieth century, Igatius propels his monstrous bulk among the flesh -pots of a fallen city, filling his Big Chief tablets with invective, until his maroon-haired mother decrees that Igatius must go to work. 'A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.' The New York Times

About the author (2000)

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 College and at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He wrote A Confederacy of Duncesin the early sixties and tried unsuccessfully to get the novel published; depressed, at least in part by his failure to place the book, he committed suicide in 1969. It was only through the tenacity of his mother that her son's book was eventually published and found the audience it deserved. His long-suppressed novel The Neon Bible, written when he was only sixteen, was eventually published as well.

A Confederacy of Dunceswon the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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