A Confederacy of Dunces — The Posthumous Pulitzer

John Kennedy Toole wrote *A Confederacy of Dunces* in the early 1960s, and every publisher rejected it. In 1969, at age 31, he killed himself. His mother Thelma spent eleven years pushing the manuscript until Walker Percy championed publication in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 — the only posthumous Pulitzer for fiction in 50 years. New Orleans has always been a place of many tongues, a trading hub built at the portage between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. The French chose the site in 1718 because it controlled the entire Mississippi River Valley. By the start of the Civil War, New Orleans was the largest city in the South, exporting most of the nation's cotton to Europe. The port made the city polyglot and specific — exactly the texture Toole captured. *A Confederacy of Dunces* is the funniest and most geographically precise novel ever set in New Orleans. You can walk every street Ignatius J. Reilly walked. A bronze statue of Ignatius stands under the clock on Canal Street outside the former D.H. Holmes department store. Eleven years is what it took to turn rejection into a Pulitzer. Thelma Toole did not stop. The statue is where you go to see what that looks like.