A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES John Kennedy Toole Grove Pr 1981 1st Black Cat Ed

Description: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel by American writer John Kennedy Toole that was published in 1980, 11 years after Toole's death. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who contributed a foreword) and Toole's mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 and is now a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States. The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar. He is an educated but slothful 30-year-old living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans. In his quest for employment, he has adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. Toole wrote the first draft in 1963 during his last few months in Puerto Rico. Critics liked the accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial. Reilly resembled Toole; Toole's experiences served as inspiration for episodes. While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend as a hot-tamale cart vendor and worked for a family that owned and operated a clothing factory. Synopsis Ignatius Jacques Reilly is an overweight and unemployed 30-year-old with a master's degree in Medieval History. He lives with his mother, Irene Reilly. He loathes the world, which he feels has lost the values of geometry and theology. One afternoon Reilly's mother drives him "downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor's seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein's for his trumpet and a new string for his lute." While Reilly waits for his mother, Officer Angelo Mancuso approaches Reilly and demands that Ignatius produce identification. Affronted and outraged by Mancuso's zeal and officiousness, Reilly protests his innocence to the crowd while denouncing the city's vices and the graft of the local police. An elderly man, Claude Robichaux, takes Reilly's side and denounces Mancuso and the police as communists. In the resulting uproar, Mancuso arrests Robichaux while Reilly and his embarrassed mother escape and take refuge in a bar. There, Mrs. Reilly drinks too much. On the way home, she crashes her car. The bills for the accident total $1,020, a sizable amount of money in early 1960s New Orleans and which would be a little over $10,000 in 2023 dollars. To help his mother pay for the accident, Ignatius must work for the first time in years. What follows is a series of adventures that introduce characters and their interactions as Ignatius flounders from one low-wage job to another. Ignatius obsesses over his wardrobe, verbally abuses his mother, and frequents movie theaters, where he condemns the actors and actresses. The novel explores the psyche of a man who, every time he feels stress, makes use of his pyloric valve. Reilly maintains an adversarial relationship, and possibly a flirtation, with the politically liberal Myrna Minkoff, his only friend from college.

Price: 19.99 USD

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

End Time: 2024-10-11T13:31:33.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD