A Confederacy of Dunces.

TOOLE, John Kennedy; Foreword by Walker Percy.

Item Number: 63038

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Fifth printing of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth. Lenthily inscribed by the author’s mother on the front free endpaper, “December 10, 1981 Appreciation and Regards from John Kennedy Toole’s Mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, to Dear Chip Ford.” Foreword by Walker Percy. Fine in near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket illustration by Ed Lindlof. A very nice example, uncommon signed.

“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue" (The New York Times Book Review). “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue" (The New York Times Book Review). The book's passage to success began in 1976 when John Kennedy Toole's mother Thelma, using a walker, hobbled into the office of the novelist Walker Percy at Loyola University. She was followed by a chauffeur carrying a manuscript that she told Mr. Percy was a ''masterpiece.'' Percy agreed to read it. He became entranced and decided that the novel was ''a major achievement, a huge comic-satiric-tragic one-of-a-kind rendering of life in New Orleans.'' After some more publishers rejected the book, Louisiana State University Press agreed to take a chance with a first printing of just 2,500 copies. It sold about 50,000 copies in hard cover and nearly 600,000 in paperback within three years of publication.