John Kennedy Toole
| John Kennedy Toole
(Author of Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces) | |||
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| Born | December 17, 1937 New Orleans, Louisiana | ||
| Died | March 25, 1969 (aged 31) Near Biloxi, Mississippi Resting place: | ||
John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937 – March 25, 1969), was a novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, known for his award-winning manuscript, A Confederacy of Dunces.
Biography
Toole was the son of John Dewey Toole, Jr. (1898-1972), and the former Thelma Ducoing (1901-1984).[1] He was educated at McDonough No. 14 Elementary School, Alcee Fortier Senior High School, and, under a National Merit Scholarship, Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. At the age of sixteen, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which was ultimately published in 1989 and made into a 1995 film. In 1959, he obtained a Master of Arts under a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in English literature at Columbia University in New York City.[2]
From 1959 to 1960, Toole taught English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana. The next year, 1960 to 1961, he taught at Hunter College in New York City. He was then drafted into the United States Army and served in Puerto Rico as the supervisor of an English training program for recruits who spoke only Spanish. On returning from the military, Toole taught from 1963 to 1969 at the former St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans.[2]
While in Puerto Rico, he began work on A Confederacy of Dunces, a comic novel set in New Orleans in the 1960s. The manuscript was first praised by Simon and Schuster Publishers in New York but rejected in 1965. After Toole's death, his mother in 1980 located a publisher, Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge for A Confederacy of Dunces with encouragement from the novelist Walker Percy. A Confederacy of Dunes received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction[2] and has been translated into eighteen languages. The protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a gargantuan self-proclaimed scholar plagued by comic egomania and slothfulness. It has been translated into eighteen languages. A bronze statue of Reilly is located at the former D. H. Holmes Department Store on Canal Street in New Orleans.[1]
At the age of thirty-one near Biloxi, Mississippi, Toole took his own life by attaching a garden hose to the exhaust pipe. He is interred at Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans.[1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 John Kennedy Toole. Findagrave.com. Retrieved on April 22, 2020.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Toole, John Kennedy. A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography: Louisiana Historical Association. Retrieved on April 22, 2020.
