About John Kennedy Toole
He wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, at age 16 in 1954, but shelved it. Later, he taught at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Hunter College and St. Mary’s Dominican College. He persuaded Simon & Schuster to publish A Confederacy of Dunces, which earned the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and he died by suicide at age 31 after struggling with paranoia and depression.
