Meet the fat, flatulent and eloquent Ignatius J.
His long-suppressed novel The Neon Bible, written when he was only sixteen, has also been published..
It was only through the tenacity of his mother that her son's book was eventually published and went on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early sixties and tried unsuccessfully to get the novel published; depressed, at least in part by his failure to place the book, he committed suicide in 1969.
He received a master's degree in English from Columbia University and taught at Hunter College and at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
This is the kind of book one wants to keep quoting from'
Anthony Burgess John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans in 1937.
A masterwork of comedy'
New York Times '
A fine funny novel. '
I succumbed, stunned and seduced, page after page, vocal with delight. . .
And he has a pirate costume and hot-dog cart to do it with .
For this misanthropic crusader against an America fallen into vice and ignorance has a mission: to rescue a naked female philosopher in distress.
But is he bothered by this? No.
By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too.
Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. . . '
This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians .
Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's light and pithy comic tale A Confederacy of Dunces, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range.
Meet the fat, flatulent and eloquent Ignatius J