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John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces immediately brings to mind another picaresque masterpiece, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. Confederacy was published posthumously eleven years after Toole's suicide. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The book may never have been published if not for the persistence of Toole's mother and the novelist Walker Percy. Set in Toole's native New Orleans, the novel is populated with eccentric, colorful French Quarter characters such as the protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Percy called a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." The novel takes its title from a Jonathan Swift proverb: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." |