Showing results for "John Kennedy Toole" in Literary History & Criticism

John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist, soldier, and professor who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. Toole wrote the novel The League of Fools in 1969. The novel was published in 1980, eleven years after Toole's suicide, and earned the late author the Pulitzer Prize.The story begins with a simple image. A boy sitting on a train, whose destination the reader knows neither, nor the reason for the journey. Even in that first chapter, we do not get detailed information about the boy, but only through the feelings and emotions he expresses, we understand his seemingly calm and ...

The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.