“When a true genius appears in the world,
you may know him by this sign, that the dunces
are all in confederacy against him.”
-Jonathan Swift
“Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”
An outrageously funny picaresque novel that rivals the works of Swift, Rabelais, and Cervantes, as well as Heller, Lewis, and Vonnegut, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is a hilarious book that also has a deeply melancholic backstory. John Kennedy Toole was an academic who penned his prized novel A Confederacy Dunces at the age of 23 while noodling around on a borrowed typewriter during his service in the army. After completing his first draft in 1964, he struggled for years to get it published (even drawing the attention of famed publisher Robert Gottlieb) but to no avail. Depressed and believing his life a failure, he committed suicide at the age of 31 in 1969. It was a shocking and tragic end to a promising young writer who would never live to see his work reach the summit of critical acclaim. Following his untimely death, the task was then left to his mother to secure the book’s publication. Somehow, after years of effort, she managed to persuade celebrated author Walker Percy to not only read the manuscript, but to become its champion. Thus, eleven years after Toole’s passing, A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published by Louisiana State University Press at long last in 1980. It quickly received praise and even won the Pulitzer Prize the following year in 1981, making John Kennedy Toole one of only three Pulitzer Prize-winners (to date) who have posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (the others being James Agee for A Death in the Family and William Faulkner for The Reivers).
A Confederacy of Dunces is, in some ways, a city novel. It offers a colorful portrait of life in mid-twentieth century New Orleans, characterized by a degree of carefree frivolity on the surface, but also a dark history of racial stratification hidden from plain sight. The novel particularly focuses on the lively streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans, however aside from its urban setting, the unforgettable protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces is Ignatius J. Reilly –the figure who makes the novel a riotous piece of work. He is a trundling, imperious, haughty, indulgent, lazy, pampered, overly-mothered, thirty-year-old former academic who roams around the city, thumbing his nose at fellow citizens, scoffing at movies in the cinema, decrying television shows, and finding signs of cultural decay everywhere he goes. In one instance, after watching wholesome television shows all afternoon, Ignatius loudly cries: “The children on that program should all be gassed.” He sees himself as an intellectual of the highest order, yet he lacks any semblance of personal care or initiative. In a 2014 Wall Street Journal review of the novel, critic Danny Heitman notes that Ignatius is an odd mix of “snob and slob.” He is obsessed with degeneracy and the perceived decline of Western Civilization since the theological and cultural heights of the Middle Ages. His eyes are colored yellow and blue, his father died twenty-one years ago, and he once had a dog named Rex who also passed on. But Ignatius seems to be unfazed by any past tragedies in his life. To make matters worse, Ignatius is a wholly disgusting fellow whose stomach valve incessantly gives him explosive flatulence. As readers, we cannot help but laugh as Ignatius burps and farts his way through a panoply of absurdist escapades.
Any great satire like A Confederacy of Dunces points readers toward both the higher virtues in life, such as Ignatius’s academic idealism and his desire to see the world improved, along with the lowly vices, such as his gluttony, obesity, incontinence, pomposity, and general oafishness. The extremes show us Ignatius’s status as a conventional failure. And Ignatius is hardly a noble figure, though he does contain within himself elements of both a Lear and a Fool –the high and the low. Somehow, Ignatius seems to be perfectly contented with himself, even as he finagles his way out of troubled situations, and he treats other people (including his own mother) with a level of peevishness rivaled only by Ebenezer Scrooge.
But the most apt literary forebearer of Ignatius J. Reilly is assuredly the famous gentleman of La Mancha, Don Quixote. Both men have seemingly read too many books and now their brains have dried up entirely. While Alonso Quijano concocts an absurd fantasy in which he plays out his own narrative as a chivalric hero in a literary dreamworld (a la Amadis of Gaul), Ignatius Reilly imagines himself as a deeply important aristocrat, an intellect of unparalleled heights, a hero tragically born in the modern age who is forced to suffer the great moral indignity of being proximal to the unwashed masses and face the unfathomable embarrassment of poverty. Throughout the book, he is furiously penning a truly great work of philosophy, “a lengthy indictment against our century,” which is actually a pretentious, irrelevant critique of The Enlightenment, as well as other “unfortunate events” since the Reformation. Guided by the female divinity Fortuna and her spinning wheel from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Ignatius bemoans the modern world for lacking “theology and geometry” while he praises an imagined monarchical medieval past wherein life was peaceful and happy. Filled with self-important delusions of grandeur, he longs for “a good, authoritarian pope” who can bring order to the world. Ignatius is a High Tory living in the American South –in other words, a silly, clownish, anachronism who is not to be taken seriously by anyone.
“What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life” (213).
Physically, he has a “fleshy balloon of a head” and dons a green hunting cap with large, dangling ear flaps. Potato chip crumbs can be spotted ingrained into his mustache, a Mickey Mouse watch strapped to his wrist, and his “voluminous tweed trousers” flop about like a great blimp as he waddles down the street. Still living at his widowed mother’s house, his room stinks of old tea leaves. On the streets, police begin to wonder if he is a pervert, always clinging to his mother, and fretfully demanding better living conditions like the bloated, insufferable, pugnacious, hypochondriac he truly is. In between bouts of playing his lute and trumpet, Ignatius spills amusingly profound aphorisms like: “When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.” Or the “veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.” Or even “with the breakdown of the Medieval system… the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendency.”
Consider how Walker Percy describes Ignatius in his wonderful forward to the novel:
“Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of –slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one—who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective… Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans from whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men’s room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a ‘proper geometry and theology’ in the modern world” (viii-ix).
At any rate, the novel begins with Ignatius standing around beneath the clock of the D.H. Holmes department store in New Orleans, but his mere presence on the street arouses the suspicions of a “mongoloid” policeman, Patrolman Mancuso, and when a small ruckus ensues, an older man named Claude Robichaux is arrested instead, and Ignatius and his mother escape police questioning into a dingy bar called the Night of Joy. But soon they are kicked out for causing a scene and subsequently crash their car into a building while Ignatius vomits all along the side of the car. As recompense for the damages, Ignatius and his poor mother are forced to pay $1,000 (more money than they can pay). After considerable argument, Ignatius’s mother compels Ignatius to finally get a job.
Ignatius has only ever had one job since college, a two-week stint at the New Orleans Public Library. Prior to that, he briefly graded papers for a professor in graduate school named Dr. Talc (he still despises Ignatius and we learn he apparently preys on young female students). Ignatius lost this position when he suddenly grew angry at a demonstration outside his window and tossed all the ungraded papers onto the protestors’ heads while shouting that he hoped they all would be sterilized. Needless to say, this job didn’t work out either. But amazingly enough, Ignatius had a girlfriend back then. Her name is Myrna Minkoff, they met in a coffeeshop while in graduate school. He remembers her as “a young, undergraduate, a loud, offensive maiden from the Bronx.” But she has since relocated to New York City where she has become a psychosexual feminist who is interested in social change and group therapy. In many ways, she represents a caricature of the emerging 1960s liberated woman. And while their relationship has continued to some extent, albeit merely in an epistolary manner, Ignatius dismisses Myrna as a “musky Minkoff minx.” He despises her overt sexuality as a deplorable example of modern degeneracy (his antipathy toward sex and sexuality comes despite several implied scenes of Ignatius masturbating), and his writings betray more than a few clues as to his deeply held misogyny –like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ignatius seems to regard women as either chaste nuns or filthy whores, and he holds little regard for both. Indeed, his own Oedipal Complex later comes to the fore when Ignatius dismisses his mother as a disgusting disgrace for falling in love with a “fascist” like Claude Robichaux.
Ignatius and his arthritic mother, Irene, live in the tiniest home on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, a poor, roach-infested “Lilliput of the eighties” with a dead banana tree in the yard, in “a block of houses built in the 1880s and ‘90s, wooden Gothic and Gilded Age relics that dripped carving and scrollwork, Boss Tweed suburban stereotypes separated by alleys so narrow that a yardstick could almost bridge them… it was a neighborhood that had degenerated from Victorian to nothing in particular, a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly –and with very limited funds” (36).
Living in this level of dilapidation and impoverishment, Ignatius seeks employment to help pay the $1,000 fine they now owe. Finding little success at first, he eventually comes upon the Levy Pants factory where he becomes gainfully employed in the office as “Department of Research and Reference – I. Reilly, Custodian.” However, as expected, his stomach valve quickly begins acting up and he starts sowing general chaos, trashing unfiled paperwork, showing up an hour late each morning, sending a belligerently angry note from the owner of the company to a long-time customer who filed a complaint (Mr. Abelman). Then one day, instigated by Myrna’s activist letters, in which “the crucial problems of the times” are of primary importance, Ignatius decides to whip up a protest/race riot, which he likens to a “Crusade for Moorish Dignity,” among the black workers in the Levy factory. He envisions it as a historic uprising intended to strike back at the modern world (and Myrna), but the black workers simply believe Ignatius is advocating for better pay for them. And when the workers refuse to violently attack Ignatius’s manager in the office Mr. Gonzalez, they simply return to the factory and Ignatius is unceremoniously fired on the spot.
The racial context here is important. Black characters in the book are forced to live under the legacy of Jim Crow. Black workers need a job to survive; white workers can work a job if they so wish. Indeed, Ignatius sparked this failed rebellion at the Levy pant factory not for the sake of the black workers, but rather for his own vain ends (as a resentful demonstration to his former girlfriend). But, of course, his plan was more likely to get all the workers fired or even arrested, rather than liberate them, even if it was partially successful. And it goes without saying that a flippant effete like Ignatius is hardly equipped to inspire a widespread political uprising. He cannot possibly understand the struggle for civil rights, hence why he so casually dismisses the idea. At one point, he rejects pitying “colored people” and suspects they might be frauds, particularly in the case of an old beggarly woman on the street. Here, we see how poor white people are put at a greater advantage than poor black people. Take the character of Burma Jones for instance. Jones is a poor black man, first introduced as a cellmate of Claude Robichaux (the elderly man who is arrested at the beginning of the novel). After Jones is released from jail (a sentence which was allegedly for stealing cashews), he quickly finds employment to avoid further trouble with the police. He reluctantly accepts a job working for “minimal wage” at the Night of Joy bar (the same bar visited by Ignatius and his mother at the start of the novel). The Night of Joy is owned by a shady woman named Lana Lee and, at one point, in order to draw-in more customers, her employee Darlene decides to perform an exotic dance with her pet cockatoo. However, Lana Lee quickly puts a stop to this fantasy on the grounds that it is unwholesome. She requests a more “dignified” act wherein Darlene performs as a “southern belle type, a big sweet virgin from the Old South whose got this pet bird on the old plantation” (221). And Burma Jones is made to participate in this “Scarla O’Horror” plantation farce (note that Toole’s selection of a title like “A Confederacy of Dunces,” despite being a nod to a quip from Jonathan Swift, has more than one meaning in the novel, highlighting the imbecilic pining that many Southerners still hold for the long-deceased, Dunce-like 19th century Confederacy which sparked the American Civil War). Anyway, Jones knows that if he leaves his low-paying job, he might wind up accused of “bein a vagran” and he could end up back in jail (or possibly be shipped off to Angola) so he joins in this ridiculous performative masquerade of Gone with the Wind and its “Lost Cause” nostalgia bait. At one point, Ignatius (in his typical tone-deaf manner) speaks with Jones and rebukes him for not desiring something more than a mere “livin wage.”
“’Shit, you think I like the Night of Joy? Ooo-wee, I wanna get someplace. I like to get someplace good, be gainfully employed, make me a livin wage.’
‘Just as I suspected,’ Ignatius said angrily. ‘In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile’” (296).
At any rate, by happenstance one day while hungrily scarfing down hot dogs, Ignatius somewhat accidentally scores himself a new job as a street hot dog vendor. The company Paradise Vendors employs him to push a hot dog cart around New Orleans, though he spends much of the time simply eating the hot dogs himself and earning very little money. On an amusing note, when Ignatius inquires what ingredients are included in the hot dogs, his new boss Mr. Clyde responds: “Rubber, cereal, ripe. Who knows? I wouldn’t touch one of them myself” (153). Suffice it to say this is a disreputable place to work.
Yet while endlessly belching and gorging himself on hot dogs, Ignatius roams the French Quarter each day, towing his “weenie wagon” and lamenting the downfall of civilization. At first, he wears a stained yellow gown at the cuffs with red smudges which may have been the result of ketchup, or perhaps even dried blood from the previous vendor who may have been stabbed to death. Ignatius is asked to don a pirate outfit for attention which gravely embarrasses Ignatius’s mother, but renders Ignatius “the czar of sausage, the mogul of meat.” Among his many misadventures in this job, Ignatius receives a complaint from the Board of Health, he attacks mediocre works of art with his novelty pirate sword (much like the great Don Quixote before him) shouting, “I am the avenging sword of taste and decency!” and he has an “apocalyptic battle with a starving prostitute,” while also accidentally advertises his hot dogs in a most crude manner as “Twelve Inches (12”) of Paradise” –a failed advertising slogan that offends the ladies walking and is quickly painted over with a variety of genitals by hoodlums. Additionally, Ignatius meets an openly gay man named Dorian Greene, and once again inspired to strike back at Myrna’s political activism, Ignatius decides to lead a revolutionary new political party of homosexual men to “Save the World Through Degeneracy” by plotting to turn all the armies of the world gay so they will “have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps.” But when he attends Greene’s gathering, Ignatius ends up boring, offending, and frustrating everyone so he is quickly tossed outside by a trio of lesbians. When his mother Irene learns of the incident, she worries he is becoming a “communiss.” All the while, she turns to drinking and growing ever closer with Claude Robichaux and his aunt Santa Battaglia (Ignatius despises the romance between his mother and Claude). And if that isn’t enough, Ignatius becomes accidentally embroiled in a pornography ring when a young man named George stashes naked pictures inside Ignatius’s hot dog container (an effort to avoid the attention of Patrolman Mancuso).
In the end, all parties converge on the Night of Joy bar on Bourbon Street (Ignatius has been invited to the performance by Burma Jones) where Darlene debuts her new Southern Belle act. It is advertised to the public as follows:
“Roberta E. Lee
presents
Harlett O’Hara,
the Virgin-ny Belle
(and pet!)”
However, almost immediately after the show begins, Darlene’s cockatoo spots Ignatius’s dangling pirate earring in the audience and swoops into the audience, lunging at Ignatius and refusing to release the earring. This leads to a chaotic scramble in the bar as Ignatius goes tumbling out the door and into the street where he is rescued from oncoming traffic by Jones but then promptly faints. All the newspapers print embarrassing photos of Ignatius’s bloated, corpulent body lying unconscious on the street outside a presumed strip club, but something else also occurs. Amidst the ruckus, Patrolman Mancuso (while undercover) has arrested Lana Lee because, as it turns out, she was secretly running a vast high school pornography syndicate, the same ring George was working for when he stashed the photographs in Ignatius’s hot dog stand (George is later arrested, as well).
Later, when Ignatius returns home from the hospital while arguing with his mother, his old boss Gus Levy unexpectedly shows up and confronts Ignatius over an angry letter that was sent to a devoted customer, Mr. Abelman of Abelman’s Dry Goods. Mr. Abelman is now suing Levy for $500,000. In a panic, Ignatius lies to Gus Levy and claims the letter was actually written by an elderly employee named Miss Trixie who was resentful over being denied her rightful retirement. Amazingly, Gus Levy leaves to question Miss Trixie (who later falsely confesses to writing the letter, believing it will help her retirement). At this point, Ignatius’s mother decides she is utterly fed up with her son’s antics and decides to call an ambulance to take him away to an insane asylum. But while left alone at the house awaiting the inevitable, Ignatius hears a surprising knock at the door and he is shocked to find his former girlfriend Myrna standing there. Myrna has driven all night from New York City because she feared Ignatius’s mental health has deteriorated and she believes she can rescue him. They quickly pile into her car and speed away. Just as they depart, the oncoming ambulance passes and heads toward Ignatius’s house to take him away to the Charity Hospital. After escaping his myriad problems in New Orleans, it almost seems as if Ignatius might have finally found a glimmer of hope.
“Now that Fortuna had saved him from one cycle, where would she spin him now? The new cycle would be so different from anything he had ever known…. As if the air were a purgative, his valve opened. He breathed again, this time more deeply. The dull headache was lifting” (394).
*********
Is Ignatius Reilly nothing more than a lovable buffoon? Or is he a dangerous malignancy on civil society? This tension seems to be at the heart of the novel. From ancient stories of Greek philosopher Thales falling down a well, or Aristophanes excoriating Socrates in The Clouds for frivolously counting fleas, to Alceste rejecting French social conventions in Moliere’s The Misanthrope, the uselessness of intellectuals has long been parodied in great works of literature. Personally, in grad school I myself met any number of high-minded, self-important, aspiring academics who were intelligent thinkers to be sure, but who nevertheless lived in poverty and squalor, giving no attention to their appearance or manners, many of whom bore striking resemblance to Ignatius Reilly (shockingly). Amazingly enough, many readers can relate to this novel after having met an Ignatius Reilly at one point or another. Notably, in a somewhat famous 2021 New Yorker essay, Tom Bissell argues that Ignatius serves as a fitting precursor to today’s reactionary, incel internet troll archetype – “…Forty years later, this red-pilled malcontent calling for a theofascist revival seems something else entirely. Ignatius J. Reilly—the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all—was no anachronism. He was a prediction.” A disheveled, excessively academic, ornery, misanthrope like Ignatius is known for clumsily igniting problems and disruptions everywhere he goes, but somehow, he manages to entirely avoid comeuppance and culpability himself. In the novel, the law serves as a threat to other characters like Lana Lee, George, Miss Trixie, and Burma Jones, but never Ignatius. And he never really seems to face hardship in a serious way –every new tribulation becomes merely another opportunity to analyze, criticize, and romanticize the situation from a distant, sanitized, academic perspective. Perhaps at best Ignatius can only hope to be a leach on society, but at worst he might aspire to be a rabble-rousing revolutionary. But does the end of the novel offer some sort of resolution for Ignatius? Will he finally be free? After all, Myrna, who actually appreciates Ignatius’s genius, has come to whisk him away, even if his future still remains very much uncertain, at the very least, his revolting stomach issue seems to have subsided for the time being.
When it was finally published 11 years after John Kennedy Toole’s death, A Confederacy of Dunces was praised by The New York Times Book Review as “a masterwork of comedy” and it was selected by The Los Angeles Times as one of the five best novels of the year. The Chicago Sun-Times called it “a foot-stomping wonder.” After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt dubbed it “The Cinderella Pulitzer Prize Novel” with the moral of its publication being: “Never trust a New York publisher.” It’s fair to say the novel had finally won critical acclaim. A Confederacy of Dunces remains an American classic to this day.
Lastly, as a testament to the novel’s enduring appeal, a bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly was erected in New Orleans on Canal Street (at 819C Canal Street), which was the location of the old D.H. Holmes Department Store. The statue, first unveiled in 1996-1997, is an homage to the opening scene of the novel wherein Ignatius is waiting for his mother before accidentally running afoul of Patrolman Mancuso. The statue is typically removed each year for Mardi Gras. Today, the D.H. Holmes Department Store has been replaced by a Hyatt Centric hotel but a plaque remains to honor the literary legacy of A Confederacy of Dunces.
Notable Quotations:
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs” (opening lines).
“Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul” (1).
“The ironic thing about that program… is that it is supposed to be an exemplum to the youth of our nation. I would like very much to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this… A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss” (42).
“My being is not without its Proustian elements” (47).
“Employers sense in me a denial of their values… They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe. That was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library” (51).
“I am an anachronism. People realize this and they resent it” (59).
“I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery” (59).
“Too long have I confined myself in Miltonic isolation and meditation. It is clearly time for me to step boldly into our society, not in the boring, passive manner of the Myrna Minkoff school of social action, but with great style and zest” (126).
“Veneration of such things as ‘turkey in the straw’ is at the very root of our current dilemma” (154).
“Nobody respects a hot dog vendor” (156).
“’The writings of Boethius may give you some insight.’
‘I read Father Keller and Billy Graham in the paper every single day.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Ignatius spluttered. ‘No wonder you are so lost’” (157).
“What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life” (213).
“Clearly an area like the French Quarter is not the proper environment for a clean-living chaste, prudent, and impressionable young Working Boy. Did Edison, Ford, or Rockefeller have to struggle against such odds?” (227).
“Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some collected comic books… I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman (255, Ignatius describing his recommended reading).
“My respiratory system, unfortunately, is below par. I suspect that I am the result of particularly weak conception on the part of my father. His sperm was probably emitted in a rather offhand manner” (295).
“We’ll work on your problems. You’re going into a whole new and vital phase. Your inactivity is over. I can tell. I can hear it. Just think of the great thought that is going to come streaming out of that head when we’ve finally cleared away all the cobwebs and taboos and crippling attachments” (390-391).
“Now that Fortuna had saved him from one cycle, where would she spin him now? The new cycle would be so different from anything he had ever known…. As if the air were a purgative, his valve opened. He breathed again, this time more deeply. The dull headache was lifting” (394).
On The 1981 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The three-member Pulitzer fiction jury in 1981 consisted of:
- Chair: Jonathan Yardley (1939-present) is a former book critic at The Washington Star (1978-1981) and former book critic at The Washington Post (1981-2014) where he ran a column entitled “Second Reading” beginning in 2003, a series which highlighted lesser known books from the past. He was known as a scathingly frank reviewer who championed authors like Michael Chabon, Edward P. Jones, Anne Tyler, William Boyd, Olga Grushin, and John Berendt. Yardley received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1981 for his book reviews in The Washington Star. He is an alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by George Washington University in 1987. His two sons with his first wife, Jim Yardley and William Yardley, are both journalists for the New York Times, and William also writes for the Los Angeles Times. Yardley and his son Jim are one of two father-son recipients of the Pulitzer Prize (his son Jim Yardley received the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his stories in the New York Times, alongside Joseph Kahn, on “ragged justice in China as the booming nation’s legal system evolves”).
- Joy Gould Boyum (1934-2021) was a professor of English, Arts and Humanities at New York University, film critic at the Wall Street Journal (1971-1983), Glamour Magazine (1981-1989), and NPR (1979-1985). Gould Boyum was a longstanding member of the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, serving as Chair in 1976, and she was the author of Double Exposure: Fiction into Film, which analyzed the film adaptations of 17 novels. She graduated from Music and Art High School, Barnard College (BA) and New York University (PhD). She married Asmund Boyum in l960, and they remained married until Asmund’s death in 2013. She died of cancer in 2021 and was survived by her two children.
- Peter S. Prescott (1935-2004) was an author and long-time book critic for Newsweek. In 1978, he won the George Polk Award for criticism. His father was Orville Prescott, book critic for The New York Times (1942-1966) who also served as a Pulitzer Prize fiction jury member in the past. His books included two collections of critical essays, a study of the juvenile-justice system and a memoir of his freshman year at Harvard. He also published a book on his criticism entitled Never in Doubt: Critical Essays on American Books, 1972-1985 (1986). He was an alumnus of Harvard University and studied for a spell at the Sorbonne. He died of liver complications resulting from diabetes in 2004. He was survived by his wife and two children.
This year, the jury made a unanimous selection with the recommendation of A Confederacy of Dunces. “Set in New Orleans, it depicts a uniquely American scene with uniquely American characters in a uniquely American language. It is uproariously funny; it is also a brooding contemplation of modern society that resolves itself, in the end, in an oddly satisfying note of affirmation. To a degree it is true to the tradition of Southern grotesque, yet it maneuvers that tradition in new and rewarding directions. Each character comes vividly and immediately alive; the sense of place is firm and palpable; the themes are developed surely and subtly.”
In the jury report, the jury also asked the board to keep in mind three observations, since the circumstances of this book are somewhat unusual: 1) to not consider the author’s death since the Pulitzer Prize “presumable is for the book not the author;” 2) that this award would be a recognition of “the enterprising and imaginative role the L.S.U. Press has filled in publishing serious fiction, a role not ordinarily undertaken by university presses;” 3) and lastly that this award would acknowledge Walker Percy’s “selfless and vital service in bringing to public attention a superb work of fiction that in all likelihood would have languished unpublished and unknown.”
The runners up for the prize this year were: Godric by Frederick Buechner and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.
Who Is John Kennedy Toole?
John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) was a native of New Orleans. While growing up, his overbearing mother Thelma Ducoing Toole often blamed her husband John for the family’s financial straits and lack of social standing –and it seems her domineering presence left an indelible impression on young John that would continue for the rest of his life. With his mother’s encouragement, he became a stage performer at the age of 10 doing comic impressions and acting (from childhood to adulthood, he was known to be a skilled dancer and impressionist). At age 16, he wrote his first novel The Neon Bible which he later dismissed as “adolescent.”
Toole received an academic scholarship to Tulane University in New Orleans, and after graduating, he studied English Literature at Columbia University (receiving a master’s degree) while teaching simultaneously at Hunter College where, at the age of 22, he became the youngest professor in the history of Hunter College. Toole’s academic specialty was sixteenth-century literature, with a focus on the plays of John Lyly, whose work was formative for Shakespeare. He taught at various Louisiana colleges, such as the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Dominican College, and quickly became a sought-after lecturer. At the time, some people called him “Ken” others called him “John.”
Toole was then drafted into the army in 1961 where he taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After receiving a promotion, he began writing A Confederacy of Dunces on a borrowed typewriter (he later finished the novel at his parents’ home following his discharge from the army).
Toole then submitted A Confederacy of Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster in 1964, where it reached the desk of legendary editor Robert Gottlieb (thanks to his editorial assistant Jean Ann Jollett). Gottlieb was especially known for green-lighting Catch-22 among other celebrated novels. Despite several revisions to A Confederacy of Dunces, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied and felt the book didn’t have a point, and when it was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., Toole decided to permanently shelve the novel. Unfortunately, Toole later became convinced that Gottlieb had stolen ideas from the book and inserted them into a different novel called Superworm by George Deaux. Gottlieb later became an executive Alfred A. Knopf and an editor at The New Yorker. When A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, Gottlieb confessed to not recalling either Toole or the book, but when he read the book again decades later, he had the same opinions about its flaws (according to his 2016 memoir). Gottlieb passed away in 2023.
After abandoning his book, the last year of Toole’s life began with his re-enrollment at Tulane to finish his PhD. But sadly, he soon began suffering from severe paranoia, culminating with him standing up in class one day and decrying a “plot” against him. He also apparently berated students in a graduate seminar at another point. Then, following an argument with his mother on the afternoon of Nixon’s inauguration in 1969, and suffering from depression and feelings of persecution, he withdrew $1,500 from his bank account and set out on a spontaneous two-month road trip that tragically ended in a forest clearing in Biloxi, Mississippi where Toole connected a rubber garden hose from his car’s exhaust pipe into the cabin, killing himself at the age of 31. In total, he had been driving around for two months and six days, visiting a variety of places, from Hearst Castle in California to Andalusia (the home of Flannery O’Connor). When his body was found, many papers were left scattered in the front seat, including an apparent note written to his parents that his mother later dismissed as having contained “terrible things.” She burned it. Some commentators have speculated that among Toole’s papers might have been the makings of a lost third novel. Perhaps this novel might have been collected and absently left in a basement of the Biloxi police station where it was washed away in Hurricane Cleo (1964). We may never really know. Toole’s funeral was held on the Elysian Fields in New Orleans, only three people attended. He is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans.
It took his mother several years to recover from her son’s suicide, but in time she found a large box in his room containing the original dirty, smudged, typo-ridden manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces. By then a retired drama teacher, she made it her life’s goal to honor her son’s memory. She submitted the manuscript to eight New York publishers to no avail. But upon discovering that Walker Percy was teaching a class at Loyola in New Orleans, she visited campus and ambushed him, took advantage of his gentlemanly demeanor, and insisted that he read her late son’s novel. As much as he wished not to, much to his chagrin, Walker Percy discovered that A Confederacy of Dunces was actually an impressive work of fiction. He later said: “It didn’t take long to recognize that there was something of quality here although I admit I felt it was a book that would only have regional appeal… Frankly I was astonished at the national response.” Walker Percy quickly became the book’s biggest proponent, getting it published by the Louisiana State University Press, with a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the rest is history.
Why did John Kennedy Toole commit suicide? Why does anyone? Some speculate he was haunted by the voice of his domineering mother and her endless criticism of his father’s failures in life. But before she died in 1984, she was quick to blame her son’s troubled mental state on editor Robert Gottlieb (she publicly referred to him as “a Jewish creature” and “not a human being”), however in the letters exchanged between Toole and Gottlieb, Toole shared his frustrations with his mother and details about his troubled family life (in one letter to a friend, he described how his mother “spends all her time telling me how stupid I am”). Other theories suggest Toole was burdened by the pressure of needing to financially support his impoverished parents. And perhaps he was struggling with his own sense of identity (speculation abounds that he may have been gay). And still others claim Toole was deeply unsettled by the culture of the ‘60s. In many ways, he was a supporter of civil rights and the need for social change, but he was also opposed to the rise of street protests and the general feeling of chaos. Perhaps in some ways, we can see echoes of his greatest creation –Ignatius J. Reilly– in Toole’s own life. It remains a great tragedy he never got to see his own alter ego fully come to fruition.
Film Adaptations
- None.
- Scott Kramer, a young executive at 20th Century Fox, tried for decades to get a film version of A Confederacy of Dunces off the ground. At one point, a script was completed by Kramer and Steven Soderbergh with David Gordon Green set to direct. In 1982, John Belushi became the first actor cast in the role of Ignatius (Richard Pryor was also set to play the role of Burma Jones). But a day or so before Belushi was scheduled to meet with executives at Universal to discuss the project, he died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont. Five months later, the woman who led the Louisiana State Film Commission was murdered by her husband, bringing efforts to shoot the film in New Orleans –and indeed the entire production itself– to a grinding halt. Other deaths linked to the project included those of actors John Candy and Chris Farley, both of whom were briefly considered for the lead role before they died. And natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina made the prospect of shooting a film in New Orleans untenable for a time. Then an all-star cast was finally brought together, including Lily Tomlin, Drew Barrymore, Mos Def, Olympia Dukakis, and Will Ferrell in a fat suit, but alas the project failed to materialize. Thus, with so many deaths and unexpected cancellations with this film, Slate eventually dubbed the ongoing saga “A Conspiracy of Dunces.”
Further Reading:
- The Neon Bible (1989) by John Kennedy Toole
- Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (2012) by Cory MacLauchlin
Literary Context 1980-1981
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1980): awarded to Polish-American poet and prose writer Czesław Miłosz who “voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.”
- National Book Award Winner (1981): Plains Song: For Female Voices by William Styron (hardcover) and The Stories of John Cheever by John Irving (paperback).
- Note: this was during a brief period wherein the National Book Awards divided out their winners between paperback and hardcover awardees (1980-1983). It was also an era when the National Book Award calendar lined up with the Pulitzer Prize, both of which awarded prizes in the calendar year after the eligibility period. Post-1984, however, the National Book Award switched back to awarding its prizes in the same calendar year.
- Booker Prize Winner (1980): The Rites of Passage by William Golding.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1980 was The Covenant by James A. Michener (previous winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific). Other notable bestsellers that year included: The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum and Firestarter by Stephen King.
- Belgian-born French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to the Académie française.
- A production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring Peter O’Toole opened at the Old Vic Theatre, London. It is often regarded as one of the disasters in theatre history.
- Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon in New York City while carrying a copy of J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye.
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams was published.
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee was published.
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco was published.
- Smiley’s People by John le Carré was published.
- The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum was published.
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson was published.
- The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks was published.
- A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Despite its anguished road to publication, A Confederacy of Dunces remains a blistering satire and a hilarious work of irony. In my view, a healthy debate is to be had as to whether or not Toole intended the novel to be a reactionary work, but nevertheless the selection of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was the right choice for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
Toole, John Kennedy. The Confederacy of Dunces. Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, New York, published by arrangement with Louisiana State University, 1980.