'A Confederacy Of Dunces'

My friend -- my archnemesis -- gifted a copy of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces in college. She dedicated it to me, Ignatious.

Since that moment, I've read the book at least six times in 10 years. It is one of the most remarkable novels I've ever read and one of the greatest in American literature, bar none.

If you don't know Toole's story, it's worth a healthy read over at Wikipedia. Born and raised in New Orleans, he went to Tulane and later Columbia. He was apparently a brilliant guy. He was an assistant professor at 22 years of age at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He was allegedly extremely popular and quite the party animal.

It was at the university where he met Bob Bryne, a slobbish professor of English specializing in medieval thought and was prone to wear a green deerstalker and play the lute.

It was Ignatious J. Reilly. He just didn't know it yet.

During his time in the military, Toole began writing A Confederacy of Dunces. He wrote and began attempting to get it published. Rejection after rejection followed and the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe affected him greatly. He began drinking heavily in the military, too.

The depression and paranoia grew and Toole's life became incredibly unstable to the point that he lost his professorship and spent his last days taking trips to several sites in addition to Andalusia, the Georgia home of deceased Southern writer Flannery O'Connor. Toole committed suicide by running exhaust with a garden hose to the inside of his car.

His mother would fight her own demons, but kept fighting to get A Confederacy of Dunces published. She did and it became an everlasting cog in American literature.