| John Kennedy Toole | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 17, 1937 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States |
| Died | March 26, 1969 (aged 31) Biloxi, Mississippi, United States |
| Occupation | novelist, professor, soldier |
| Notable work(s) | A Confederacy of Dunces |
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John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole's only other published novel was the Neon Bible a book he wrote at the age of 16 and which was published posthumously.
Toole's novels remained unpublished during his lifetime. Some years after his suicide, his mother, Thelma Toole, brought the manuscript of Dunces to the attention of novelist Walker Percy, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Toole, known throughout his life to friends and family as "Ken", lived a sheltered childhood in Uptown New Orleans. His mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, was a charmingly flamboyant but narcissistic woman, who doted on John, her only child. Toole's father worked as a car salesman and mechanic before succumbing to deafness and frail health, while his mother supplemented the family income with music lessons.
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 Louisiana at Lafayette (then University of Southwestern Louisiana) in Lafayette. Toole's next academic post was in New York City, where he taught at Hunter College. Although he pursued a doctorate at Columbia, his studies were interrupted by his being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961. Toole served two years in Puerto Rico, teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits.
After serving in the military, Toole returned to his parents' home in New Orleans and began teaching at Dominican College. Toole frequented the French Quarter and could often be found consorting with musicians. On one occasion, he assisted a musician friend with his second job selling tamales from a cart. While at Tulane University, Toole worked briefly in a men's clothing factory. Both of these experiences inspired memorable scenarios in his comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.
Toole was noted among his friends as a raconteur with an acid wit and a gift for mimicry.[1]
Toole sent the manuscript of his novel, written during the early 1960s, to Simon and Schuster. The publisher rejected the novel, commenting that it "isn't really about anything."[2] Toole's health suffered as he lost hope of seeing his work—which he considered a comic masterpiece—in print. He stopped teaching at Dominican, quit his doctoral classes and began to drink heavily while being medicated for severe headaches.
Toole's biographers, Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy, have suggested that a factor in Toole's depression was confusion about his sexuality and identity. In their biography, Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole, they tracked down and interviewed many of Ken Toole's acquaintances. While one friend suggested that his domineering mother left no emotional room for any other woman in Toole's life (although he did date some women exclusively in his lifetime), others have disputed the suggestion that he was a homosexual, including David Kubach, a longtime friend who also served with Toole in the army. According to Kubach, the authors of Ignatius Rising were not personally acquainted with Toole, and "not knowing him makes a big difference." [3]
Toole disappeared on January 20, 1969, after a dispute with his mother. Receipts found in his car show that he drove to the West Coast and then to Milledgeville, Georgia. Here he visited Andalusia, the home of deceased writer Flannery O'Connor. It was during what is assumed to be a trip back to New Orleans that Toole stopped outside Biloxi, Mississippi, on March 26, 1969, and committed suicide by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car. An envelope was left on the dashboard of the car and was marked "to my parents". The suicide note inside the envelope was destroyed by his mother. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans.[4]
After his death, Thelma Toole in 1976 persuaded author Walker Percy, a faculty member at Loyola University New Orleans, to read the manuscript for Dunces. Initially hesitant, Percy ultimately loved the book commenting in disbelief, "Surely it was not possible that it was so good."[1] A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, and Percy provided the foreword.
The first printing was only 2,500 copies by Louisiana State University Press.[5] A number of these were sent to Scott Kramer, an executive at 20th Century Fox, to pitch around Hollywood, but the book generated little interest.[6] However, the novel attracted much attention in the literary world. A year later, in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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. Due to the great interest in Toole, the novel was published in 1989.[7] The novel is set in the early 1940s and is about a blue collar Southern family. It is narrated by the young son.[7] It was adapted into a feature film in 1995, directed by Terence Davies, and was a critical and commercial failure.[8]