October 2, 2025 by A.S. Van Dorston

Favorite book #7. “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift

One of the all-time great American satires languished unpublished for seventeen years. While A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, it was written in 1963, and Simon and Schuster nearly published it in 1968, but wanted him to re-write it. John Kenneddy Toole wouldn’t change a word. It wasn’t even Toole’s first book, as he wrote The Neon Bible when he was sixteen. Tragically Toole committed suicide in 1969 and would never see it published in his lifetime, or enjoy the vindication of his unrevised book winning the Pulitzer in 1981.

Ignatius J. Reilly is a larger than life slothful slacker with more education (a degree in Medieval History) than sense or job skills who fills Big Chief tablets with misanthropic rants about life in the 20th century. His mother threatens to kick him out unless he gets a job, and his hilarious incompetence with practical daily life causes chaos wherever he goes, from a pants factory to Paradise Hot Dogs. Egged on by letters from college friend Myrna Minkoff, a political radical, he unsuccessfully tries to incite a violent demonstration of the pants factory’s workforce.

“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking. ”

Ignatius’ adventures portray a wild array of colorful characters based on people Toole knew in the French Quarter of the early 1960s, including a wild gay party where he dresses as a pirate, the Night of Joy stripclub where his friend Darlene’s Southern Belle act is assisted by a pet cockatoo while Burma Jones, a black man, is compelled to dress as a plantation slave while working as the doorman. The escalation of events prompts his mother to try to have him committed to a mental hospital.

Underneath the chaos and comedy lies some real sadness in Ignatius’ struggle for identity, with social hypocrisy, as well as the lasting effects of racial segregation in the American South. New Orleans has embraced the book, putting a bronze statue of Ignatius outside of where the former D.H. Holmes Department Store was located, where the first scene of the book takes place.