Traces the life and early death of the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces, recounting Toole's upbringing in New Orleans, the crushing

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New Y

"Ken has a real gift for mimicry and a refined sense of the absurd . . . the English faculty . . .both fear and court Ken because of his biting comic talent." -

“A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century” that “belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCulle

The phenomenal success of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is now legendary, a story that has long beckoned a deeper exploration