fiction microblog #1

I thought I would start of this blog by looking into the book I'm reading. I'll do some of that in my actual, larger post, but for now let's just delve deeper into what's going on. For now, I'm specifically focusing on the author and his story, because apparently this book has an interesting history (haha, his story, history). We usually look into this stuff for the curriculum books, and I love being a good student.

I decided to read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. After getting that choice out of the way, I proceeded to do some preliminary research about the author and what's going on. Keep in mind that, as of writing this (2/20/18), I have yet to finish the book. Sorry. So avoiding spoilers while doing said research was a nightmare. The Internet is an eternal hellscape. Nothing is sacred. 

Anyways, let's talk about John Kennedy Toole for a bit. He's from New Orleans. 

Here he is!

He committed suicide when he was 31- part of the reason being that his work was frequently rejected by publishers. 

So A Confederacy of Dunces was published after he died. His mother, Thelma, made it her life's work to showcase her son's talent and get the manuscript for Confederacy published. It was rejected, still, several times over the five years she pushed for publication. Thelma decided to absolutely barrage a local author, Walker Percy, pushing him to read John Toole's writing. Percy, for the most part, ignored this, but occasionally complained about Thelma's constant presence. 

Thelma wouldn't take the ignorance any longer, and pushed her way into Percy's office and pretty much forced him to read it. The good news is that Percy loved it! But it would take about three more years until it was actually published. Percy even has his own little "introduction" in the book about this whole Thelma scenario and how much he loved the book (in my version of it, at least).

But hey, once it was published it got a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction! So things really worked out for John in the end. 

One more interesting thing about this book- people have tried several times to turn this book into a movie, but all of the actors who were going to (or were supposed to) play the lead died. So that's pretty spooky. There's a curse now about it now. Seriously. Look it up if you don't believe me.

So now I can reflect on the fact that this book was an underdog in the publishing world, I guess. Which is pretty neat.
Thank god for Thelma Toole!