I, John Kennedy Toole: A Novel
by Kent Carroll /
2020 / English / PDF
7.8 MB Download
The story behind John Kennedy Toole’s groundbreaking A Confederacy of Dunces—how it was discovered, championed, and published—is as engaging and colorful as the novel itself.
I, John Kennedy Toole is the novelized story of the funny, tragic, riveting narrative behind the making of an American masterpiece.
The book traces Toole’s life in New Orleans through his adolescence, his stay at Columbia University in New York, his attempts to escape the burden of his demanding mother and his weak father, his retreat into a world of his own creation, and finally the invention of astonishing characters that came to living reality for both readers (and the author himself) in his prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces.
The other fascinating (and mostly unknown) part of the story is how after a decade of rebuke and dismissal the novel came to a brilliant author, Walker Percy, and a young publisher, Kent Carroll, who separately rescued the book, then published it with verve and devotion.
