A Confederacy of Dunces.

First Edition of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces.

TOOLE, John Kennedy; Foreword by Walker Percy.

Item Number: 125812

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in near fine dust jacket. Jacket illustration by Ed Lindlof. Foreword by Walker Percy. An exceptional example.

“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue" (The New York Times Book Review). “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue" (The New York Times Book Review). The book's passage to success began in 1976 when John Kennedy Toole's mother Thelma, using a walker, hobbled into the office of the novelist Walker Percy at Loyola University. She was followed by a chauffeur carrying a manuscript that she told Mr. Percy was a ''masterpiece.'' Percy agreed to read it. He became entranced 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 some more publishers rejected the book, Louisiana State University Press agreed to take a chance with a first printing of just 2,500 copies. It sold about 50,000 copies in hard cover and nearly 600,000 in paperback within three years of publication.

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