A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

This novel won the Pulitzer prize in 1981, a dozen years after the author’s suicide, and the year after publication. It took the long path to publication; the author's mother was very persistent in representing the book, and it almost didn't get published. It's been on my list to read for decades, primarily because it is one of a handful of Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction that I haven't read. What I didn't realize about A Confederacy of Dunces is that it's set in a place with which I'm absolutely smitten: New Orleans, Louisiana.
The main character is Ignatius J. Reilly, a pompous, arrogant, and enormous 30 year old man who is highly educated but still living with his mother Irene in her house in New Orleans in the early 1960s. When they run into financial trouble, Ignatius’s mother forces him to get a job. Ignatius, who spends most of his days lazing in his bedroom passing gas or trying to write stories on his Big Chief tablets, sees most work as beneath him. He first takes a job as an office assistant who tries to stage a factory worker revolution, then as a hot dog vendor in the French Quarter.  While he professes outrage at most things, Ignatius seems to be driven by the desire to impress Myrna, a young woman from New York that he knew in college and with whom he frequently trades letters. A Confederacy of Dunces taps into the language, music, and colorful characters of New Orleans’ French Quarter, and many believe this to be the best work of fiction about this fantastic southern city.
Give this novel to upper-level high school students who are looking to attend a liberal arts college or readers who like to have most of the 'classics' in their repertoire. On the list of Pulitzer Prize winning fiction titles, A Confederacy of Dunces lands as one of the more humorous, (not to mention satirical) winners of the last forty years, alongside Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2003), and Junot Diaz's fantastic The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2008).