Born on This Day - John Kennedy Toole

Author of the hilarious and award-winning book, A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole was born on this day in 1937. A native of New Orleans, (Ken) Toole crafted a delightful, maddeningly funny storyline which sets the plot of this book careening around his hometown. Filled with richly described oddball characters , the story orbits around one of the oddest main characters of them all - Ignatius J. Reilly. You must read the book to believe him, and if you do, you will be rewarded with one of the funniest stories ever written. What makes this achievement poignant, however, is that A Confederacy of Dunces was published and then awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction posthumously. Ken Toole commited suicide in 1969 believing his manuscript would never be picked up by a publisher. Look for a copy of this book in our fiction wing. It's a marvel.