Quote:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”--Martin Luther King

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

John Kennedy Toole

Happy birthday to John Kennedy Toole, New Orleans author of A Confederacy of Dunces, (Dec. 17, 1937--March 26, 1969).

Toole submitted Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster, where it reached noted editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb considered Toole talented but felt his comic novel was essentially pointless. Despite several revisions, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied, and after the book was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., he shelved the novel. Suffering from depression and feelings of persecution, Toole left home on a journey around the country. He stopped in Biloxi, Mississippi to end his life by running a garden hose in from the exhaust of his car to the cabin. Some years later, his mother brought the manuscript of Dunces to the attention of novelist Walker Percy, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Source: Wikipedia


TS

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