Victim John Kennedy Toole

Aspiring New Orleans writer John Kennedy Toole died of suicide in his early 30s, the victim of stupid, humorless publishers.

Growing up in the Crescent City, Toole did a remarkable job of soaking up the vagaries of that wonderful and unique city, and of its residents.

He attended Tulane, did a master's at Columbia in New York City and had begun work on his Ph.D. there when, in 1961, he was drafted into the Army.

Thereafter, Toole moved back in with his parents in New Orleans, did some teaching and worked at a number of odd jobs while writing a pair of novels.

He appears to have regarded his first novel as, essentially, a warm-up exercise but was very happy about his second manuscript.

But the book had a fault. It was original and brilliantly funny. It was not about celebrities, nor was its author a celebrity. Consequently, publishers didn't know what to make of it and rejected the manuscript.

Toole knew he had written something good and became so despondent that he took his own life in 1969 by carbon monoxide in a car.

Toole's mother was still determined that the book should be published and considered her son an unappreciated genius, rejected by dunces.

Famous writer Walker Percy was teaching at Loyola in 1976. Mrs. Toole tried phoning him, then went to his office with manuscript in hand. With reluctance, Percy agreed to give it a look.

What he found amazed him: one of the funniest books ever written, with a protagonist unique in all literature. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, was a lazy, supercilious slob, yet so endearingly out of place in the modern world as to be fascinating.

Toole's grasp of the New Orleans patois was just about perfect, as well. Percy saw to it that the book got published, and, as so often has happened in the history of publishing, the book, "A Confederacy of Dunces," was a huge success. It won Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981 and sold well all over the world. Truly it stands as one of the best works of comic fiction ever--as as a monument to the dubious judgment of book publishers.