The Story of "A Confederacy of Dunces"

This is arguably the best biography out there about John Kennedy Toole, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1981). It is also definitely the best biography about his mother, Thelma Toole, who was instrumental in getting the novel published after her son's suicide. As Joel L. Fletcher explains, without Thelma, there would be no Ken. And Thelma's jounrey to publish the book is as interesting as Ken's own struggle to write it.

I say best biography because the challenge with any biography of John Kennedy Toole is to gather sufficient material to tell the story of his life. Toole left few records beyond a handful of letters to friends and family (including to Fletcher, and many of these letters between the two are transcribed in this biography). There is another biography available called Ignatious Rising (2001), but by all accounts - Fletcher's incivive attack on that book's credibility not the least - the authors of Ignatious Rising, Rene Nevils and Deborah Hardy, were at great pains to speculate and elaborate on Ken's life, without having any read evidence to back them up. For that is precisely what is missing from Ken's life - the evidence - but Fletcher is able to side-step that question somewhat by focusing on Thelma as much as her "genius son", as she called Ken.