Toole was no poete maudit, living on the margins of society and filling notebooks with crabbed, avant garde jottings incomprehensible to his own era. And not just a classic but one of those “you’ve got read this” books passed from hand to hand. Percy found a publisher for “A Confederacy of Dunces” the novel became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and has been rightly regarded as classic.
After years of persistence, his mother persuaded the respected Louisiana novelist Walker Percy to read the manuscript. What’s saddest of all is that Toole didn’t live to witness his novel’s posthumous success. (Toole refused and suffered a complete breakdown in the publisher’s office when he arrived to retrieve the manuscript.) What’s also tragic is that the rejection, or incomplete acceptance of the novel, depending on your point of view, transformed Toole from a lively, dapper, sociable young man into a seedy, paranoid recluse. The editor who declined to publish it, Robert Gottlieb, perhaps the foremost literary editor of his time, left a remarkably sympathetic and encouraging correspondence with Toole, and offered to have another look at the novel if Toole made some major revisions. Toole died by his own hand in 1969, after failing to find a publisher for his novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces.” What’s sad, or even tragic, as the subtitle of this biography of Toole would have it, is the set of circumstances surrounding the novel’s fate. Of all the sad writer stories, there are few that are sadder than the story of John Kennedy Toole. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menuīutterfly in the Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces By Cory MacLauchlin (Da Capo Press)
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