John Kennedy Toole (; December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. At 16 in 1954, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he shelved in the same year, not finding a willing publisher; he later dismissed it as "adolescent". The first of the Creole Ducoing family arrived in Louisiana from France in the early 19th century, and the Tooles immigrated to America from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s. Toole's father worked as a car salesman, and his mother, forced to give up her teaching job when she married (as was the custom at the time and place), gave private lessons in music, speech, and dramatic expression. Toole was known to friends and family as "Ken" until the final few months of his life, when he insisted on being called John.
Toole's highly cultured mother was a controlling woman, especially with her son. His father was less involved and sometimes complained of his lack of influence in their child's upbringing. Despite this, he and his father bonded through a shared interest in baseball and cars. Toole's mother chose the friends he could associate with, and felt his cousins on his father's side were too common for him to be around. Toole received high marks in elementary school and, from a young age, expressed a desire to excel academically. He skipped ahead a grade, from first to second, after taking an IQ test at the age of six, and would also eventually skip the fourth grade.
When Toole was ten, his mother gathered a group of child stage entertainers she named the Junior Variety Performers. The troupe, with Toole as its star, consisted of 50 children of varying skills and ages. While the troupe was well-received, Toole also engaged in other entertainment ventures, such as playing the lead in three productions of the Children's Workshop Theatre of New Orleans, emceeing a radio show called Telekids, modeling for newspaper ads, and developing a solo show of comic impersonations entitled Great Lovers of the World.
An excellent student, Toole curtailed his stage work when he entered high school (Alcée Fortier High). He concentrated on his academic work. Toole wrote for the school newspaper Silver and Blue, worked on the yearbook The Tarpon, and won several essay contests on subjects such as the Louisiana Purchase and the American Merchant Marine. He took up debating, a skill his father had used to win the state debate championship in high school. Toole spoke at gatherings of civic organizations such as Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. In high school, Toole spent a lot of time at the home of classmate Larry McGee, and dated McGee's sister, Jane. Jane later said that Toole never wanted to go home and would purposely spend almost all of his free time at the McGees'. With the McGees, Toole would engage in mischievous pranks and go on double dates with Larry and his girlfriend, Buzz. The couples spent their free time at the local pool or cruising in Toole's car.
As a teenager in 1954, Toole made his first trip out of Louisiana. On a field trip, he visited Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C. He especially enjoyed New York and filled a cherished scrapbook with pictures from his visit, which included trips on the New York City subway, an excursion on a boat in the New York Harbor, and visits to the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, and Times Square; he also enjoyed a performance of The Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall and brought home a program.
Toole became the editor of the news section of the school newspaper, and maintained high marks throughout high school. He was one of two New Orleanians voted outstanding citizen at the Pelican (now Louisiana) Boys State convention and he was invited back to serve the following year as a counsellor.
During his senior year, Toole wrote The Neon Bible, a short Southern Gothic novel that has been compared in style to Flannery O'Connor, a favorite author of Toole’s. before his father lost his job, forcing the family into a small shoddily built home. Set in 1940s Mississippi, the backwoods Baptist community setting is similar to a location to which Toole had traveled with a high-school friend for a literary contest. The novel's sudden outburst of violence at the end has been described as incongruous with what preceded it. Neon Bible failed to attract interest from publishers and did not appear in print until after Toole's death.
College studies and professorships
In high school, Toole, as editor of the school newspaper, had written, under a pseudonym, a column of gossip and wit, Fish Tales, and while at Tulane he worked on the college newspaper, the Hullabaloo, writing articles, reviewing books, and drawing cartoons. The cartoons were noted for their subtlety and sophistication. Around this time, Toole began associating with a local blues band that performed at high schools, in the French Quarter, and in the Irish Channel. Because Toole's classmates and family looked down on the French Quarter as being for tourists and the Irish Channel as a place for lowlifes, Toole kept his trips to those places a secret. His closest friend was guitarist Don Stevens, nicknamed "Steve Cha-Cha," with whom he bonded over their shared love of blues music and Beat poets. Stevens also had a side job pushing a hot tamale cart around town and, on days when he was unavailable for work, Toole would fill in for him. According to Stevens's bandmate Sidney Snow, Toole loved eating the tamales. Toole later used these experiences as material for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, whose protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly pushes a hot dog cart around town, usually eating most of the profits. Also, like Reilly, Toole later worked at a family business that manufactured men's clothing, Haspel Brothers. He worked for J. B. Tonkel, who married one of the Haspel daughters. "Ken watched the Haspels' business dealings with great interest, absorbing and remembering their troubles and intrigues," He enrolled in Columbia University in New York on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study English literature. He took on a heavy workload so that he could earn his master's degree in a single year. In his free time he dated Ruth Kathmann, another student from Tulane, who was studying journalism at Columbia. The couple would go dancing at the Roseland Ballroom, as the $2.00 entrance fee allowed them to dance all night and suited their limited budget. Toole was considered a talented dancer. There is some question as to whether they were engaged, with friends claiming they were but Kathmann saying only that Toole asked her to marry him, but she declined. After he returned to New Orleans they rarely saw each other, and she married another man. This year is generally considered one of the happiest of his life. While at USL he rented a dilapidated apartment from an elderly and eccentric widow on Convent Street. Toole described the apartment as a "Conradian metaphor" to friends. Because he was saving for a return to Columbia to get his PhD, Toole was a notorious skinflint during his year at USL. His friends noticed this and forced him to pay for and throw a party at his home. The party was a success and generally considered the best party thrown that year. In contrast to this image of an outgoing, lively young man, when Toole's mother came to visit, friends noticed that he became sullen and withdrawn. His friend Pat Rickels commented that Thelma "was absolutely convinced that he was without flaw and that all the hopes of the world lay in him. It was an extreme form of maternalism, where all your pride and all your hopes are in one person. He had to grow up with that burden. She was a very ostentatious, shrill, loud-voiced, bossy, bragging woman."
thumb|220px|[[Lady Fortune|Fortuna with the Wheel of Fortune from a medieval manuscript of a work by Boccaccio. Fortuna, as interpreted by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy, was a favorite subject of Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly.]]
It was at USL that Toole met Bob Byrne, an eccentric English professor who is considered one of the primary inspirations for the character of Ignatius J. Reilly. Byrne specialized in the medieval period, and he and Toole frequently discussed the philosopher Boethius and the wheel of Fortuna, as described in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius was the favorite philosopher of Ignatius J. Reilly, who frequently referred to Fortuna and Consolation of Philosophy. Like Ignatius, Byrne was a self-admitted devoted slob who played the lute, and also wore a deerstalker hunting cap, which Toole frequently chided him about. On several occasions while listening to her music with friends he enigmatically remarked, "Is Frances Faye God?"
In May 1960, Toole accepted a three-year fellowship to study for a PhD in Renaissance literature at the University of Washington at Seattle. However, when he was offered a teaching position at Hunter College in New York, which suited his desire to study at Columbia, he chose Hunter instead. At 22, he became the youngest professor in Hunter's history. Although he pursued a doctorate at Columbia, he became unhappy with his PhD. He, however, wrote to Fletcher that he still liked Hunter, "principally because the aggressive, pseudo-intellectual, 'liberal' girl students are continuously amusing." Fletcher surmised that based on these girls, he created the character Myrna Minkoff for A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole, although generally only a "Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer," "Every time the elevator door opens at Hunter, you are confronted by 20 pairs of burning eyes, 20 sets of bangs and everyone waiting for someone to push a Negro," he is reported to have said. Both women said their relationships with Toole never progressed beyond the level of a good night kiss.
Military service
Toole's studies were interrupted by his being drafted into the United States Army in 1961. Toole (who was fluent in Spanish) served two years at Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits. He rose quickly in the military ranks. In under a year, he attained the rank of sergeant, and received numerous awards and citations. While serving in Puerto Rico, he frequently traveled throughout the Caribbean, either alone or with members of his company.<!----I can't find the exact page number for this, but I know for a fact I read it, will look for it later--> Toole, however, began to dread the frustrations of military life and the oppressive heat of Puerto Rico. He described his work there in a letter to a friend:
He also engaged in one of the favorite activities of military personnel on the island: alcohol consumption. Both the soldiers and the instructors at the base drank excessively, as alcohol was cheap and plentiful. Toole remarked in another letter to Fletcher, "We are all rotting here at the moment. The decreased draft has meant no trainees since June ... the inactivity here, coupled with the remnants of a rainy and enervating summer has (have?) plunged the English instructors into an abyss of drinking and inertia. Occasionally someone will struggle off to the beach or to San Juan, but the maxim here remains, 'It's too hot. When Emilie Griffin paid Toole a visit in December 1961 she was dismayed at what she saw. Toole was notably depressed and while dining at a local hotel she noted that "the windows on all sides of our table were filled with perfect rainbows. Ken was sitting in a pocket of darkness surrounded by these brilliant colored arches and he never looked at them." Disgusted, he wrote home, "It's a wonder I haven't been stabbed yet or paralyzed by intestinal diseases on this insane little geographical mountain top protruding from the Caribbean. However, under any circumstances the loss of the ring affects me deeply." Toole's army buddy David Kubach, also an aspiring writer, lent him a green Swedish-made Halda typewriter for use in his office. The barracks consisted solely of college educated English professors, which gave it a different makeup from usual army companies. In contrast to almost all other army barracks where gays kept their sexual orientation a secret, this barracks had a contingent of men who were open about their homosexuality. The gay men reserved a portion of the barracks for themselves and, as they did not proposition any of the straight instructors, they were left alone. Toole's response was to ignore their behavior and it lost him the respect of some of the men in the barracks. The problem came to a head when a gay instructor attempted suicide by overdosing on APC (aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine) tablets after being spurned by another soldier. When Toole found the man he waited a half-hour to call for help, hoping he would awaken on his own. Some of his fellow soldiers were livid and held a meeting deciding whether to report Toole's negligence. Ultimately, they did not report his behavior and the army never filed any charges but his relationships with many of the men were irrevocably changed.
After this incident, Toole became withdrawn and began spending more and more time in his office typing what would eventually become his master work, A Confederacy of Dunces. It was not a secret that Toole was writing a book. Late at night, his fellow soldiers could often hear the sound of the typewriter keys. Although he was secretive about the novel among the other men, Toole showed the early portions of it to Kubach who gave him positive feedback. He later commented that he began to "talk and act like Ignatius" during this period as he became more and more immersed in the creation of the book. His letter home to his parents of April 10, 1963, shows these similarities:
Return home and completion of A Confederacy of Dunces
Toole received a hardship discharge as his parents were having difficult economic times, his father struggling with deafness and an increasing incidence of irrational fear and paranoia. Toole looked forward to coming home and spending time talking with his mother. Toole turned down an offer to return to his post at Hunter, He initially liked the position as it allowed him to teach for only 10.5 hours a week and afforded him the same leisure time he had during his less active periods in the service. The nuns on the faculty were enamored of Toole from the start, considering him well mannered, genteel, and charming. He used his free time to work on his novel, and to spend some time with his musician friend Sidney Snow at Snow's home in the Irish Channel and at various night clubs where he would watch Snow and his bandmates perform, among other things, covers of songs by The Beatles. The November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy caused Toole to fall into severe depression. He stopped writing and drank heavily. In February 1964 he resumed writing, at which point he added an ending and sent the manuscript to Simon & Schuster. and is considered one of the seminal works of twentieth century Southern literature. It has received praise for its accurate use of various New Orleans dialects, including the Yat dialect. It concerns protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a slothful, obese, self-styled philosopher who lives with his mother. After an early financial setback for the Reilly family, caused by Ignatius, he is forced by his mother to seek employment in a variety of menial jobs to help the household financially, for which he is continually resentful of her. He subsequently takes revenge on several businesses for perceived slights. He incites black workers to insurrection at Levy Pants Company, eats more hot dogs than he sells, and attempts to break up a strip club. Along the way he runs into a divergent cast of characters, including Myrna Minkoff, a rebellious socialist intellectual with whom he conducts an ongoing literary correspondence. Although Reilly is partially modeled after Toole's eccentric friend Bob Byrne, Byrne and others have stated that much of Reilly is actually based on Toole himself:
The book eventually reached senior editor Robert Gottlieb, who had talked the then-unknown Joseph Heller into completing the classic comic novel Catch-22. Gottlieb and Toole began a two-year correspondence and dialogue over the novel which would ultimately result in bitter disappointment on both sides. While Gottlieb felt Toole was undoubtedly talented, he was unhappy with the book in its original form. He felt that it had one basic flaw which he expressed to Toole in an early letter:
thumb|200px|Toole made an unannounced trip to see editor [[Robert Gottlieb in person at the Simon & Schuster building in New York City in February 1965. When he found out Gottlieb was out of town, Toole felt humiliated.]]
Initially, although Toole was disappointed that the novel could not be published as is, he was exuberant that a major publisher was interested in it. He entered his second year of teaching at Dominican as one of the favorite new professors on staff. Students marveled at his wit, and Toole would make entire classes burst into laughter while hardly showing any expression. He never retold a story or joke, and had many repeat students. Gottlieb told Toole they felt he was "... wildly funny often, funnier than almost anyone around". Toole decided that it would be best for Gottlieb to return the manuscript, saying "Aside from a few 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." Toole made a trip to New York to see Gottlieb in person; however, he was out of town and Toole came back disappointed. He felt that he had embarrassed himself by giving a rambling, uncomfortable speech explaining his situation to one of Gottlieb's office staff. He returned home having left a note for Gottlieb to call him, and they later talked for an hour on the phone. In this conversation Gottlieb reiterated that he would not accept the novel without further revision. He suggested that Toole move on to writing something else, an idea which Toole ultimately rejected.