A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by the American writer John Kennedy Toole, written in the early 1960s and published posthumously in 1980, eleven years after Toole's suicide at the age of thirty-one, following his mother Thelma's persistent efforts to get the manuscript published and the novelist Walker Percy's eventual advocacy for it. Set in early-1960s New Orleans, the novel follows Ignatius J. Reilly, an overweight, arrogant, unemployed thirty-year-old with a master's degree in medieval history who lives with his long-suffering mother and holds the modern world in near-total contempt, preferring the philosophy of Boethius to any form of gainful work. When his mother's car accident forces Ignatius to finally seek employment, his misadventures take him through a series of jobs, including a chaotic stint at a pants factory and a disastrous career as a hot dog vendor, bringing him into contact with a vivid gallery of New Orleans characters whose overlapping schemes and grievances the novel weaves into a single farcical plot. Toole's title, drawn from a line by Jonathan Swift about genius being recognizable by the confederacy of dunces arrayed against it, frames Ignatius as a self-styled misunderstood intellect surrounded by a city of fools, even as the novel's comedy repeatedly undercuts his own pretensions. A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 and is widely regarded as one of the funniest and most distinctive American novels of the twentieth century.