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The Tragic Death of a Literary Genius
Picture this: It’s 1969, and a 31-year-old writer sits in his car in Mississippi, the engine running, a garden hose connecting his exhaust to the cabin. John Kennedy Toole used a garden hose to pump exhaust fumes into his car on March 26, 1969. He’d just spent years battling depression and rejection, watching publishers dismiss what would become one of America’s greatest comic novels. What happened next would take more than a decade to unfold, revealing one of publishing’s most haunting near-misses.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, yet its author never lived to see a single review. This is the story of how A Confederacy of Dunces almost disappeared forever, and why we’re lucky it didn’t.
A Manuscript Born in the Army
Much of the first draft of A Confederacy of Dunces was written while Toole was in the army, stationed in Puerto Rico and teaching English to new recruits. After graduating from Tulane University with honors, Toole had been pursuing his doctorate at Columbia when Uncle Sam came calling. But military service turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
After receiving a promotion, he used his private office to begin writing A Confederacy of Dunces, which he finished at his parents’ home after his discharge. The tropical heat of Puerto Rico somehow gave birth to the swampy atmosphere of New Orleans that would make his novel legendary.
The Editor Who Said No to Genius
When Toole returned to civilian life, he was confident his masterpiece would find a home. Toole submitted A Confederacy of Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster, where it reached editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb was no lightweight – he was one of the most respected editors in the business.
But here’s where things went sideways. Gottlieb remarked that he believed Toole talented but that the novel had no point. The book, despite its “wonderfulness,” Gottlieb wrote, “isn’t really about anything. And that’s something no one can do anything about.” The two entered a lengthy back-and-forth, with Toole trying to maintain his patience. Ultimately, the author decided that he did not want to completely overhaul the work on the off chance that Gottlieb would publish it.
When Depression Takes the Wheel
The rejection hit Toole harder than anyone could have imagined. Despite several revisions, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied, and after the book was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., Toole shelved the novel. Suffering from depression and feelings of persecution, Toole left home on a journey around the country.
Until his death in 1969, Toole spiralled into alcoholism and depression. Towards the end of his life he became paranoid and delusional, believing that others were attempting to steal his book. The brilliant mind that had created Ignatius J. Reilly was consuming itself with doubt and despair.
A Mother’s Unstoppable Mission
Most stories would end there, with genius buried in a Mississippi grave. But Thelma Toole wasn’t about to let her son’s masterpiece disappear. The book would never have been published if Toole’s mother had not found a smeared carbon copy of the manuscript left in the house following Toole’s 1969 death at 31. 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. For nearly a decade, she would become publishing’s most persistent advocate.
The Eight Publishers Who Got Away
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. Can you imagine? Eight different publishing houses had the chance to claim one of literature’s greatest comic novels, and they all said no.
After spending so much time sending the book to publishers, and striking out with all of them, Thelma decided she needed a different approach. Sometimes persistence isn’t enough – you need strategy.
Walker Percy: The Reluctant Hero
Thelma’s new strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: forget the publishers, go straight to the writers. Thelma repeatedly called Walker Percy, an author and college instructor at Loyola University New Orleans, to demand for him to read it. Eventually she found her way to the office of renowned author Walker Percy, who was teaching in the English department at Loyola University New Orleans. She forced him to take a copy of the manuscript and made him promise to read it.
Percy probably thought he was dealing with another delusional literary parent. But something extraordinary happened when he cracked open that smudged manuscript. As he recounts in his foreword to the published work, initially he read with great hesitation, but “in this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that is 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.”
A 2,500-Copy Gamble That Changed Everything
Percy championed the work, circulating it among his students, getting an excerpt published in the New Orleans Review, and appealing to several publishers before submitting the manuscript to Louisiana State University Press, which published the novel in 1980 with a small print run of twenty-five hundred copies. The first print run was only 2,500 copies, so a first edition of the book is relatively rare.
Think about that for a moment. Louisiana State University Press took a chance on an unknown dead author with a tiny print run. The book was published by LSU Press in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. Sometimes the biggest risks yield the most incredible rewards.
The Pulitzer Prize Shocker
The following year, in a shocking denouement, A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Nobody saw it coming. A posthumously published novel by an unknown author from a small university press? It was like watching a high school baseball team win the World Series.
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. He joined an exclusive club he’d never know he belonged to.
From 2,500 Copies to Global Phenomenon
What happened next defied every publishing prediction. Today, there are over 1,500,000 copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages. Toole’s posthumous masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in more than two dozen languages. Some sources put the numbers even higher – It has since sold well over a million copies.
Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a foreword) and Toole’s mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success. From that microscopic print run of 2,500 copies to millions of readers worldwide – it’s a publishing fairy tale that almost never happened.
The Curse of Ignatius Reilly
Success brought its own strange problems. There have been repeated attempts to turn the book into a film. In 1982, Harold Ramis was to write and direct an adaptation, starring John Belushi as Ignatius and Richard Pryor as Burma Jones, but Belushi’s death prevented this. Later, John Candy and Chris Farley were touted for the lead, but both of them, like Belushi, also died at an early age, leading many to ascribe a curse to the role of Ignatius.
The “curse” became Hollywood legend. Three different actors who were supposed to play Ignatius died young, creating an eerie parallel to Toole’s own tragic fate. It’s as if the novel’s dark birth story cast a shadow over everyone who tried to bring it to the screen.
Robert Gottlieb’s Lasting Regret
What about the editor who started it all by saying no? 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. 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 one of his career’s haunting mistakes.
Rejecting the book ended up haunting Gottlieb. Imagine being the editor who passed on a Pulitzer Prize winner that went on to sell millions of copies. It’s the kind of “what if” that keeps publishing professionals awake at night.
A Bronze Memorial to What Almost Wasn’t
In 1996 the city unveiled a bronze statue of Ignatius—wearing his trademark muffler and hunting cap—on Canal Street, in front of the former D. H. Holmes department store, where the novel begins. A bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly is located under the clock on the down-river side of the 800 block of Canal Street, New Orleans.
There’s something beautifully ironic about a statue commemorating a character who almost never existed in print. Tourists now pose with Ignatius daily, completely unaware that they’re celebrating one of literature’s greatest rescue stories. The statue stands as a monument not just to Toole’s genius, but to the power of a mother’s love and a stranger’s literary judgment.
The Manuscripts That Vanish Forever
It makes you wonder, though, how many masterpieces are stacked on old bureaus, as “Dunces” was, languishing after a rejection letter or two. We’ll probably never know. This thought should terrify every book lover. How many brilliant novels have been lost because their authors gave up too soon, or because their advocates weren’t as persistent as Thelma Toole?
While Tulane University in New Orleans retains a collection of Toole’s papers, and some early drafts have been found, the location of the original manuscript is unknown. Even today, pieces of this publishing miracle remain mysteries, lost to time like so many other literary treasures.
The story of A Confederacy of Dunces proves that genius doesn’t always recognize itself, and that sometimes the most important person in a writer’s life isn’t an editor or agent – it’s the one who refuses to let their work die. Thelma Toole’s decade-long crusade saved not just her son’s novel, but gave the world one of its greatest comic characters. Without her relentless faith, Ignatius J. Reilly would have remained forever trapped in a manuscript drawer, and we’d all be poorer for it. How many other literary treasures are sitting forgotten in attics right now, waiting for their own Thelma Toole to rescue them?
Christian Wiedeck, all the way from Germany, loves music festivals, especially in the USA. His articles bring the excitement of these events to readers worldwide.
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