A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures."
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What you might want to know about A Confederacy of Dunces
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Ignatius J. Reilly is a thirty-year-old medieval-philosophy obsessive who lives with his mother in 1960s New Orleans. His half-hearted job hunt sends him through hot dog carts, French Quarter strip clubs, and one disaster of a protest.
Yes. A Confederacy of Dunces won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The award was posthumous: John Kennedy Toole died by suicide in 1969 after publishers rejected the manuscript. His mother spent more than a decade getting it published.
A Confederacy of Dunces is considered one of the great American comic novels, with Ignatius J. Reilly often listed among the most memorable protagonists in 20th-century literature. The novel's New Orleans setting and over-the-top characters have given it a passionate cult following.
Multiple film adaptations have been attempted with stars including John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, John Goodman, and Will Ferrell, but each project has fallen apart. The novel is sometimes called cursed in Hollywood for this reason.
A Confederacy of Dunces was written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980 by Penguin Books, Limited.
A Confederacy of Dunces is 391 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Confederacy of Dunces takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
A Confederacy of Dunces is a standalone novel by John Kennedy Toole, not part of a series.
A Confederacy of Dunces is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
