A Confederacy of Dunces

Ignatius J. Reilly is the most magnificently impossible protagonist in American fiction — a medieval scholar living with his mother in New Orleans, writing his philosophical magnum opus in a Big Chief notebook, catastrophically employed as a hot dog vendor and department store worker, at total war with modernity in all its forms. Toole submitted the novel repeatedly, was rejected everywhere, and died by suicide at 31. His mother spent years getting it published posthumously. It won the Pulitzer Prize. The biography is inseparable from the book — a novel about a man the world refused to take seriously, championed by a mother who refused to let it disappear, finally recognized as a masterpiece. The most complete comic portrait of the man who refuses every available category and suffers magnificently for it. New Orleans as a specific place with specific people, rendered with love and exasperation in equal measure.