Reilly, who lives in New Orleans with his overweening mother, Irene. “Dunces” details the adventures of a scabrous, slothful, and hippopotamically fat medievalist named Ignatius J. In 1969, at the age of thirty-one, Toole asphyxiated himself-in despair, it is often assumed, over his failure to publish “ A Confederacy of Dunces,” the comic novel he wrote mostly while stationed in Puerto Rico, and which went unpublished until 1980, when it was released by Louisiana State University Press. As one of his female friends said, “It would be easy to fall in love with a man that could dance like John Kennedy Toole.” He was also a talented mimic and a surprisingly graceful dancer. In 1961, he was drafted by the Army and wound up teaching English in Puerto Rico, where his innovative language classes earned him frequent accolades and promotions. (Toole’s academic specialty was sixteenth-century literature, with a focus on the plays of John Lyly, whose work was formative for Shakespeare.) At twenty-two, Toole became the youngest professor in the history of Hunter College.
Following Tulane, he attended Columbia and earned his master’s degree with a barely reëdited version of his undergraduate thesis, for which he received high honors. He entered Tulane University as an engineering major-predictably, he was a teen-age math whiz-but switched to English after a year. The prized only child of older parents, Toole began high school at twelve and finished at sixteen. John Kennedy Toole, one of the most famous “failures” in the history of American literature, spent most of his life being good at things.
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