John Kennedy Toole

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John Kennedy Toole (born December 17, 1937 in New Orleans , † March 26, 1969 in Biloxi , Mississippi ) was an American writer whose novel The Conspiracy of the Idiots (partly also as Ignaz or The Conspiracy of the Idiots ) was published only a decade later his suicide was published and won the Pulitzer Prize .

Life

Toole studied at New York's Columbia University and, after graduating from UL Lafayette, taught English and later at New York's Hunter College . A doctorate at Columbia University he had to interrupt in 1961 when he was drafted into the military. He completed this in Puerto Rico , where he taught Spanish-speaking soldiers English. After his military service he returned to Louisiana and spent most of his time in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the old town shaped by the French colonial era.

Toole sent the manuscript of his novel A Confederacy of Dunces to the publishing house Simon & Schuster , which rejected it after initial interest. Other publishers were not ready to publish either. However, Toole thought his novel was a masterpiece and fell into depression after repeated cancellations by the publishers and began to drink. Some biographers suggest that perplexity about his sexual orientation contributed to Toole's personal decline. In 1969 he committed suicide by piping the exhaust of his car into the interior with a hose.

After Toole's death, his mother tried in vain for years to find a publisher for A Confederacy of Dunces . Eventually she urged Walker Percy to read the manuscript. He was surprised by the high quality of the novel and found a publisher in 1980. The novel was hailed by critics as a masterpiece of southern literature; Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the best novel of the year. It has since been translated into at least 18 languages ​​and sold millions of times. Another novel Tooles ( The Neon Bible ) was published in 1989, which he completed at the age of 16 but never intended for publication.

novel

A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel that portrays life in New Orleans in a pointed way. The protagonist is Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy and hungry intellectual who lives at home with his widowed mother. He despises modernity, against which, locked in his musty little room, he is writing an extensive pamphlet. He has to earn his own living after his mother caused an accident (with property damage) while drunk. From job to job he moves from one grotesque situation to the next and insults God and the world on his odyssey, often with references to Boethius ' work Vom Solst der Philosophie , whose structure is also provided by the organizational principle of the novel. The novel has clearly autobiographical features. Especially in the secondary characters (Police Inspector Mancuso, Santa Battaglia, Burma Jones, Dorian Greene) he caricaturally describes the lower class and "scene" of old New Orleans. The title of the novel is derived from a dictum by Jonathan Swift : "When a true genius appears on this earth, you will recognize it by the fact that the idiots conspire against it."

Phil Johnston is working on a screenplay that will be made into a film under the direction of James Bobin .

Works

literature

  • Cory MacLauchlin: Butterfly in the Typewriter. The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces . Da Capo Press, Cambridge (MA) 2012, ISBN 9780306820403
  • René Pol Nevils, Deborah George Hardy: Ignatius Rising. The Life of John Kennedy Toole . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2001, ISBN 0-80-712680-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dunces Finds Its Ignatius in Galifianakis , Claude Brodesser-Akner, May 22, 2012
  2. ↑ Annemarie Stoltenberg : The Idiots' Conspiracy ( Memento from December 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), NDR, August 23, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Toole, John Kennedy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH New Orleans , Louisiana , United States
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 1969
Place of death Biloxi , Mississippi , United States