A Confederacy of Dunces [First Edition, Seventh Printing]

Toole, John Kennedy; Percy, Walker (Foreword)

ISBN 10: 0807106577 / ISBN 13: 9780807106570

Published by Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1980

About this Item

1980 at title page and copyright page. Stated: "Seventh Printing (June, 1981). Tan with greenish tint, full cloth boards, black stylized spine titles, fine. Pages fine; no writing. Bind fine, square; remains tightly bound and relatively as new. Dust wrapper, fine; unclipped 12.95, protected in new clear sleeve. Matches first printing in design and quality with classic Ed Lindloff wrapper illustration; identical to the third printing with Chicago Sun-Times blurb at back jacket panel. Sadly, the author, John Kennedy Toole, took his own life at 32, after facing consistent rejection from nearly every American publisher. Toole's mother, finally was able to have her son's work posthumously published; and, as fate would have it, the satirical novel won the Pulitzer Prize. "A masterwork of comedy. pungent slapstick, sature and intellectual incongruities. make for a grand comic fugue" (New York Time). Presented here is "a great slob of a man in violent revolt against the entire twentieth century!" This book's unusual path to success began in 1976 when John Kennedy Toole's mother Thelma, using a walker, hobbled into the office of novelist Walker Percy at Loyola University. She was followed by a chauffeur carrying a manuscript that she told Mr. Percy was a ''masterpiece''. Percy reluctantly agreed to read it. He became entranced as he read, and decided that the novel was ''a major achievement, a huge comic-satiric-tragic one-of-a-kind rendering of life in New Orleans.'' After several more publishers rejected the book, Louisiana State University Press agreed to take a chance with a first printing of only 2,500. The soon to be Pulitzer Prize winner went on to 50,000 copies in hard cover and nearly 600,000 in paperback within three years. Manufactured in the United States of America. 338 pages. Insured post. Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" Tall.

Seller Inventory # 021114

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Confederacy of Dunces [First Edition, Seventh Printing]
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London
• Publication Date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807106577
• ISBN 13: 9780807106570
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Lindlof, Ed (Wrapper Illustration)
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

A spectacular, Pultizer Prize-winning novel by a master of comedy, beloved by readers and critics alike. The place is the French Quarter, the characters, denizens of New Orleans's lower depths.

Review

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber