John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans. He studied at Tulane University and Columbia, taught English in Louisiana and New York, and wrote A Confederacy of Dunces while serving in the army in Puerto Rico. He published nothing in his lifetime: after Simon & Schuster declined the novel he set the manuscript aside, and he took his own life at thirty-one. His mother, Thelma, spent years pressing the typescript on publishers until the novelist Walker Percy agreed to read it; Louisiana State University Press brought it out in 1980, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. The Neon Bible, written when he was sixteen, was published in 1989.