John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. At sixteen, in 1954, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he shelved the same year. Born in 1937, he died in 1969, long before his comic masterpiece reached readers. He was a successful and popular professor, first at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, then at Hunter College, and finally at St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans. Having persuaded Simon and Schuster to take A Confederacy of Dunces, he could not resolve editorial disputes with them, and he suffered as a result of the novel's failure.