On March 26, 1969, John Kennedy Toole used a garden hose to pump exhaust fumes into his car. He wouldn’t live to see the success of his novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” which he had tried and failed to get published.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, but it also became beloved by audiences who connected with the romp of a picaresque, a dialect-driven New Orleans yarn about a gaseous, garrulous, non-fool-abider, would-be philosopher named Ignatius J. Reilly who lives with his mother.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review
