Almanac of Story Tellers: John Kennedy Toole

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books 

Today is the story of Dec. 17th

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    It is the 351st day of the year, leaving 14 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1937, the American author John Kennedy Toole was born.

    Toole had one story to tell, and he told it remarkably well, with wit and verve. It is a picaresque novel with a spot-on character, Ignatius J. Reilly, who epitomized the appealing rogue. 

    But Toole never got to see his book, A Confederacy of Dunces, get published and  win the Pulitzer Prize. How it did is just as much of a picaresque tale, with a realistic, if ultimately sad, touch.

    Toole was born and reared in New Orleans, the son of a domineering and overprotective mother. She thought her son was a genius who should not play with the children in his neighborhood.

    He became a teacher and writer, and was drafted into the Army, where he had enough much free time he was able to write his book. It was based in the city he lived in, and filled with characters similar to those he had met in life. He sent the manuscript to a publisher in New York, who ultimately rejected it. 

 

    Depressed, Toole began drinking heavily. He started dressing and acting oddly, ranting at his students. He disappeared in January 1969. Two months later, his body was found in his car, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning from a tube that he had connected from his exhaust pipe though a closed window of his car.

    He left a suicide note, but his mother, Thelma Toole, destroyed it. She also found a copy of his completed book, was convinced it was a masterpiece by her brilliant son, and spent a decade trying to get it published. She eventually persuaded Walker Percy, a professor and writer, to read it. He did, also thought it was wonderful, and found a publisher.

    It hit the shelves in 1980. It won the Pulitzer in 1981. Critics have praised its writing and its structure. It has been called a "brilliant, weird, and surreal tale." Percy said the Reilly character was "a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one, who is in a violent revolt against the entire modern age."

    (Toole did author another book, The Neon Bible, when he was a teenager. He thought it was junk juvenilia. It was published posthumously. It was little remarked on.)