John Kennedy Toole

The only child of John Dewey Toole Jr. and Thelma Ducoing Toole, Toole grew up in a household shaped by his mother's strong interest in his education. He was a precocious student who read widely and skipped grades, and he went on to Tulane University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English. He then studied at Columbia University, receiving a master's degree, and began teaching at Hunter College in New York.

Toole's time in New York was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army. Stationed in Puerto Rico, he taught English to Spanish-speaking soldiers. After his discharge he returned to Louisiana and took a teaching position at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. There he worked on the manuscript that became A Confederacy of Dunces, a comic novel set in New Orleans and built around Ignatius J. Reilly, an eccentric, learned, and outrageously opinionated character.

In the mid-1960s Toole submitted the novel to Simon & Schuster, where editor Robert Gottlieb expressed interest but ultimately declined it. The rejection devastated Toole, and he did not live to see the book in print; he died by suicide in 1969. Afterward his mother found a copy of the manuscript and campaigned to get it published. She brought it to Walker Percy, a novelist teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans, who was initially reluctant but eventually recognized its comic gifts and wrote an introduction. LSU Press published A Confederacy of Dunces in 1980, and the following year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Toole had also written The Neon Bible as a teenager; that novel was published posthumously in 1989. A Confederacy of Dunces became a cult classic and a widely read example of Southern comic fiction. Its New Orleans setting and Ignatius's ranting voice gave Toole a lasting place in American literature despite his small body of work.

John Kennedy Toole was born on December 17, 1937 in Biloxi, Mississippi, United States. In Cardology (Destiny Cards), December 17, 1937 corresponds to the Ace of Clubs, making the Ace of Clubs his Birth Card.

In numerology, the name adds another layer to the birth-date profile. The letters of a person’s name are used to explore inner motivation, personality, expression, and the qualities they bring into relationships and everyday life. Explore how his original name John Kennedy Toole influences his life and personality.