Reading Order
A Confederacy of Dunces Reading Order
John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) is a complete standalone novel. It follows Ignatius J. Reilly, a large, flatulent, medieval-philosophy-obsessed thirty-year-old who lives with his mother in New Orleans and who is forced by circumstances to seek employment — first in a pants factory, then as a hot dog vendor. Set in 1960s New Orleans, it is one of the funniest novels in American literature. Toole submitted the novel to publishers throughout the 1960s and, after repeated rejection, killed himself in 1969; his mother submitted it posthumously, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
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A Confederacy of Dunces
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A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole·1980·Standalone — Ignatius J. Reilly in 1960s New Orleans; forced by his mother to get a job; the funniest American novel of the last century; won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, twelve years after Toole's death
A Confederacy of Dunces — Frequently Asked Questions
Is A Confederacy of Dunces a standalone?
Yes — A Confederacy of Dunces is entirely self-contained. John Kennedy Toole's only other completed novel, The Neon Bible (1989), was written when he was sixteen and is a much simpler, more conventional story — a boy's account of his family in the rural American South. It bears no relationship to A Confederacy of Dunces in plot, character, or tone.
Why was A Confederacy of Dunces published posthumously?
John Kennedy Toole submitted A Confederacy of Dunces to Simon & Schuster in the mid-1960s and developed a correspondence with an editor there, Robert Gottlieb, who ultimately rejected it. After years of further unsuccessful submissions and deteriorating mental health, Toole died by suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-one. His mother, Thelma Toole, spent the following decade trying to place the novel until she reached the novelist Walker Percy at Loyola University of the South. Percy agreed reluctantly to read it, expecting to reject it, and instead championed its publication at Louisiana State University Press in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
What does the title A Confederacy of Dunces mean?
The title comes from a quotation by Jonathan Swift: 'When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.' Ignatius J. Reilly takes Swift's claim perfectly seriously and applies it to himself — he is the true genius, and everyone around him is a dunce in confederacy against him. The novel's comedy depends partly on whether the reader shares Ignatius's self-assessment.
Is A Confederacy of Dunces being adapted into a film?
A Confederacy of Dunces has been in various states of development as a film for decades. Projects involving directors including Harold Ramis and Steven Soderbergh and actors including John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, and Zach Galifianakis have been announced and then abandoned. As of the mid-2020s, a film starring Shameik Moore as Ignatius was in development at Universal Pictures. The novel has famously resisted adaptation, with multiple projects collapsing before production.
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