In this and other aspects of his life, there have over the year been very different reports of who and what Toole was or wasn’t. He apparently never developed a sustained relationship with a woman. While in New York dated Ruth Kathmann, but the relationship didn’t survive his return to New Orleans in 1959. In 1958 he graduated from Tulane with honors, got a master’s at Columbia, writing his thesis on the Elizabethan poet John Lyly.
(She prevented its publication while she lived, not wanting the proceeds to go to other family members).ĭuring his college years, he accumulated much of the material later appearing in the book the French Quarter, pushing a tamale cart, exposure to the Haspel Brothers business and the family, models for Levy Pants. It was published in 1989 after a prolonged family fight over ownership and only after Thelma Toole died. At the age of 16, he wrote a Southern Gothic novel, The Neon Bible, which he characterized as ‘a grim, sociologic attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South’. A gifted student, he was a national merit scholar and editor of his school paper, receiving a full scholarship to Tulane.
Very precocious from an early age, his mother doted on him, extolling his talents as a scholar and actor while intimately, obsessively and overbearingly involved with him in his life and career, his father much less so. Toole was born into a middle-class family in New Orleans of creole and Irish ancestry. The title comes from a quote by Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Its author, John Kennedy Toole was born in 1937 and died in 1969, committing suicide eleven years before the book was published. See James Evans’ Commentary and Book Review Questions, below:Ī Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980 by the Louisiana State University Press. To attend, please contact Murray, Coordinator, at You may also participate in this discussion, by adding your comment to the dialogue box below this column. James will lead our First Friday Classic Book Club Discussion of A Confederacy of the Dunces on Friday, June 7, 2019, from 10 to Noon at the North Chesterfield, Virginia County Library 325 N Courthouse Road, North Chesterfield, VA, 23235. Article and Book Club Discussion Questions by James Evans
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