15 Fascinating Facts About John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’

In 1980, readers were introduced to “slob extraordinary” Ignatius J. Reilly, the cantankerous, work-averse, self-described medieval scholar know-it-all at the center of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a novel decades in the making that, despite a tiny original print run, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. Tragically, Toole never got to witness the success of his first (but not his only) novel, which has a backstory as fascinating as the tome itself. Here are 16 things you might not know about A Confederacy of Dunces, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year.

1. The novel’s author was a prodigy.
2. Toole wrote the bulk of A Confederacy of Dunces while stationed in Puerto Rico.
3. The title is a reference to Jonathan Swift.
4. Ignatius J. Reilly is based on a friend of the author.
5. The novel was rejected by Simon & Schuster because it “wasn’t really about anything.”
6. Toole’s mother, Thelma, convinced him to show the book to another publisher.
7. Thelma took the manuscript to publishers after Toole’s death.
8. Author Walker Percy helped get A Confederacy of Dunces published.
9. The book’s success was a surprise to many people.
10. Rejecting the book ended up haunting Gottlieb.
11. A first edition copy is rare—and expensive.
12. You can see a first edition copy for free.
13. The Neon Bible was published as a result of Dunces’ success—against Thelma Toole’s wishes.
14. There’s a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly in New Orleans.
15. A number of directors have tried, and failed, to adapt the novel into a movie.

The novel’s author was a prodigy.

John Kennedy Toole, who was born in New Orleans on December 17, 1937, was a wunderkind: After skipping two grades, he entered high school when he was just 12 years old and graduated at 16, which is also when he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible. Nothing initially came of the book, though that would change a few decades later (more on that below).

At 16, Toole earned a scholarship to Tulane University, where he studied engineering before switching his major to English literature in his freshman year. Toole also worked as a cartoonist for The Tulane Hullabaloo, the school’s newspaper.

After graduating from Tulane, Toole continued his education at Columbia University, where he earned a master’s in English. He remained in academics, teaching English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) then went back to New York City to teach at Hunter College. He was just 22 years old at the time, making him the youngest ever professor in Hunter College’s history. 

Toole wrote the bulk of A Confederacy of Dunces while stationed in Puerto Rico.

In 1961, Toole was drafted into the Army and stationed in Puerto Rico’s Fort Buchanan for two years, where he taught English. During his service he received a promotion that came with a private office, which is where he wrote most of A Confederacy of Dunces in 1963. 

The title is a reference to Jonathan Swift.

The book’s title is a nod to satirist Jonathan Swift’s essay “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting,” in which Swift writes, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” The “genius” in question in Toole’s case is his protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly—an impatient (albeit intelligent) man who considers himself superior to most of the people he interacts with on a daily basis. 

Ignatius J. Reilly is based on a friend of the author.

Toole based part of Reilly’s character on his friend and fellow University of Southwestern Louisiana professor Bob Byrne. In Cory MacLauchlin’s Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, he describes Byrne as “a mustached medievalist, tall and burly with dark hair” who regularly assigned Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to every class he taught. Like Reilly, Byrne was also a devout consumer of hot dogs and suffered from severe flatulence.

Some of Reilly’s adventures, including temporarily running a hot tamale cart and working at a clothing factory, were details adopted from Toole’s own life. 

The novel was rejected by Simon & Schuster because it “wasn’t really about anything.”

In 1964, Toole submitted a copy of his manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, a well-known editor with Simon & Schuster who had worked with Joseph Heller on Catch-22. Though Gottlieb recognized Toole’s talent, he didn’t believe the book was even close to being ready to publish. He did, however, keep the manuscript. He offered the young author some suggested changes, and said he’d love to read anything else he might want to send his way. But he wasn’t ready to say yes to A Confederacy of Dunces.

Toole and Gottlieb continued their correspondence, with the author submitting revised sections to the editor. Toole would later write to friends that in his letters, Gottlieb had told him the novel was “full of ‘wonderfulness’ and ‘excitements’ and ‘glories.’ ” He also suggested that it was too “intelligent to be only a farce” and declared that it must have “purpose and meaning.”

Ultimately, however, Gottlieb was suggesting tweaks that Toole didn’t feel he could make to his book. In December 1964, Gottlieb sent a letter to Toole in which he made it clear that he would not be publishing A Confederacy of Dunces in its current form. Gottlieb explained [PDF] that even “with all its wonderfulnesses, the book—even better plotted (and still better plottable)—does not have a reason; it’s a brilliant exercise in invention, but unlike Catch-22 and Mother Kisses and V and the others, it isn’t really about anything. And that’s something no one can do anything about.”

Just a few weeks later, in January 1965, Toole wrote back to Gottlieb, stating that “The only sensible thing to do, it seems to me, is to ask for the manuscript [back]. Aside from some deletions, I don’t think I could really do much to the book now—and, of course, even with revisions you might not be satisfied. I can’t even think of much I could do to the book.”

After Gottlieb returned the manuscript with a now-missing letter that apparently gave Toole hope that they could continue to work together, the author flew to New York City and showed up at Gottleib’s office, unannounced, to meet with him. But Gottlieb was out of town. Toole was reportedly so embarrassed that he suffered a nervous breakdown in the publisher’s office. 

Toole’s mother, Thelma, convinced him to show the book to another publisher.

Toole did not take Gottlieb’s rejection lightly. His already fragile mental state began to fracture even further, and at one point he decided to stop working on the book altogether. But Thelma did not want him to give up.

When she learned that author, journalist, and publisher Hodding Carter Jr.—a fellow Louisianian—was teaching at Tulane, she convinced her son to bring him a copy of the book. Carter met with Toole, and was kind about it, but had no interest in helping to get it published. The rejection only further humiliated Toole, who reportedly blamed his mother for the incident. Ultimately, he decided to shelve the book entirely. 

Thelma took the manuscript to publishers after Toole’s death.

On March 26, 1969, Toole died by suicide in Biloxi, Mississippi. He had been on an extended road trip that took him all the way to California. It was believed he was headed home to New Orleans at the time of his death.

In 1971, Thelma discovered a copy of her son’s manuscript. Knowing how heavily Toole’s literary rejections weighed on him, she became determined to see A Confederacy of Dunces published. “I’ve been reading since I was a little girl and I knew John’s book was good,” she told The New York Times in 1981 of the near-decade she spent working to get the book into the right hands. “When he came back from the Army he gave it to me and I finished it the next night. It was great, I told him.”

In the years following her son’s death, Thelma set about sending A Confederacy of Dunces to eight more editors in the hopes of finally seeing it published. They all passed. Still, she wasn’t ready to give up. 

Author Walker Percy helped get A Confederacy of Dunces published.

After spending so much time sending the book to publishers, and striking out with all of them, Thelma decided she needed a different approach. So she brought a carbon copy of the manuscript to Walker Percy, the National Book Award-winning author of The Moviegoer, who was teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. Percy was admittedly skeptical, and recounted the experience in the foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces, writing, “I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me” who told him “that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Percy asked. “Because it is a great novel,” Thelma replied.

“The lady was persistent,” he continued, “and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript.” The author figured he “could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther.” Instead, “I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.”

With Percy as its champion, Louisiana State University Press agreed to publish A Confederacy of Dunces. The book was released in 1980 with a small initial print run of just 2500 copies. 

The book’s success was a surprise to many people.

While A Confederacy of Dunces started out as a cult classic, word of its brilliance soon began to spread. In 1981, Toole’s little tome that could was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, beating out Frederick Buechner’s Gothic and William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Toole is one of only three authors to posthumously win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—the other two were James Agee, who won for A Death in the Family in 1958 three years after his death, and William Faulkner, who won for The Reivers in 1963, the year following his passing. Toole’s win in 1981 came 12 years after the author’s death.

Today, A Confederacy of Dunces has sold more than 2 million copies and been translated into more than two dozen languages.

Rejecting the book ended up haunting Gottlieb.

Throughout his long career, Gottlieb served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, where he worked with some of the world’s most talented writers, including Heller, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and John le Carré. He also served as the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, and did some notable writing of his own. However, he had regrets about projects that he had passed on, including John Fowles’s The Collector and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. In his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader: A Life, he described rejecting A Confederacy of Dunces as his “most conspicuous failure.”

What made Gottlieb’s admission particularly interesting was that he previously had no recollection of Toole. In 1981, The New York Times reached out to Gottlieb after Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The paper reported that when they spoke with Gottlieb on the phone, he “said that he did not remember the man [Toole], the manuscript, or the book.”

A first edition copy is rare—and expensive.

Because of the limited first print run, finding a first-edition copy of A Confederacy of Dunces is difficult. And if you do happen to find one, it will cost you: For a book in good condition, you’ll likely spend between $7500 and $10,000.

You can see a first edition copy for free.

As testament to A Confederacy of Dunces’ importance to the city of New Orleans, the Historic New Orleans Collection includes a first-edition copy of the book. Making it even more singular is that it’s dated and signed by Toole’s mother with the following inscription: “May 9, 1980. A merited contribution to the Historic New Orleans Collection, John Kennedy Toole’s mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole.” 

The Neon Bible was published as a result of Dunces’ success—against Thelma Toole’s wishes.

Post-Dunces, there was demand for more of Toole’s work, so Grove Press published The Neon Bible in 1989—despite the fact that Thelma never wanted it to see the light of day.

Due to a quirk in Louisiana’s inheritance laws, Toole’s family members all stood to financially benefit from the success of A Confederacy of Dunces. Before the book became a classic, Thelma had convinced the rest of the family to give up any claims they might have to part of the book’s profits. But they wouldn’t do the same for The Neon Bible, which infuriated Thelma. She would not allow it to be published during her lifetime, and even left instructions that the book was to remain shelved if anyone in the family stood to gain financial benefit. Toole’s family members (on his father’s side) eventually filed a lawsuit, which is how it arrived in bookstores five years after Thelma’s death in 1984. 

The novel had its flaws—and Toole himself had described it as “grim,” “adolescent,” and just plain “bad”—but it received generally positive reviews, especially when critics considered that Toole had been just 16 when it was written.

Reviewing it for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “Though it ends somewhat abruptly in an incongruous outburst of violence and blood, The Neon Bible not only stands as a remarkable achievement for a 16-year-old writer, but it also serves as a testament (more valid than Dunces, in this critic’s opinion) to the genuine talents of Toole.” 

There’s a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly in New Orleans.

The bronze statue, which was unveiled in 1996, is a tribute to the book’s opening scene, in which Ignatius waits for his mother outside the D.H. Holmes Department Store in a hunting cap and scarf, flannel shirt, and baggy pants, with a Werlein’s shopping bag in his hand. The statue is located at 819C Canal Street, the former location of D.H. Holmes, which is now the Hyatt Centric French Quarter New Orleans hotel.

A number of directors have tried, and failed, to adapt the novel into a movie.

Though A Confederacy of Dunces has been successfully produced as a stage play (with Nick Offerman as Ignatius), Hollywood hasn’t had as much luck adapting it into a film—though not for lack of trying. A handful of different stars have been attached to the project or talked about to play Ignatius over the past five decades, including John Belushi, John Candy, Josh Mostel (son of Zero Mostel), Robbie Coltrane, Chris Farley, John Goodman, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and Zach Galifianakis.

Stephen Soderbergh is one of the many directors who has also done some work on a potential film. His theory about why the movie can’t get off the ground? “I think it’s cursed,” he said. “I’m not prone to superstition, but that project has got bad mojo on it.” (The Neon Bible, however, was adapted into a film in 1995.)

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