John Kennedy Toole

American · 1937 to 1969

Born John Kennedy Toole on December 17, 1937, in New Orleans, the only child of a car salesman and a former teacher of music and speech who pinned all her ambitions on her son, he was a precocious mimic who skipped two grades and began performing comic impersonations at the age of ten in a children's troupe his mother had assembled around him. He took a bachelor's degree at Tulane and a master's at Columbia, then was drafted into the army and posted to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits and wrote much of A Confederacy of Dunces in his officer's quarters at night. The novel found its way to Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster, who admired its talent but pressed for revisions Toole could not bear to make; after a final rejection in 1966, he shelved the manuscript and went on teaching at St Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans, where his students adored him. By 1968 he had begun to suffer paranoia and a fixed conviction that he was being persecuted. In January 1969 he left home on a long aimless drive across the South, stopped at Flannery O'Connor's house in Milledgeville, then turned for the Gulf coast. He died on March 26, 1969, on a back road outside Biloxi, Mississippi, at the age of thirty-one, by running a garden hose from the exhaust into the window of his car. His mother Thelma kept the smudged carbon copy of his novel on top of an armoire and, after a five-year campaign, pressed it on Walker Percy at Loyola; it was published in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.