John Kennedy Toole
American novelist (1937–1969)
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. At 16 in 1954, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he shelved in the same year, not finding a willing publisher; he later dismissed it as "adolescent". Toole was a successful and popular professor, first at University of Southwestern Louisiana, then Hunter College, and finally St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans. Having persuaded Simon & Schuster
to accept A Confederacy of Dunces, he was unable to resolve editorial disputes. Due in part to the novel's failure, he suffered from paranoia and depression, dying by suicide at the age of 31.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Kennedy Toole” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.