"A GREAT SLOB OF A MAN IN VIOLENT REVOLT AGAINST THE ENTIRE 20TH CENTURY": FIRST EDITION OF A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES

TOOLE, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Octavo, original beige cloth, original dust jacket, custom slipcase. $9200.

First edition of Toole's posthumously published, Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical novel—"nothing less than a grand comic fugue"—one of only 2500 copies printed, signed on the title page by novelist Walker Percy, who was instrumental in bringing the work to publication and who wrote the foreword.

Starring the "Falstaff of the French Quarter," this beloved comic masterpiece is "a gross farce, a blustering satire, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book that begins with a solitary fat man but quickly picks up cops and B-girls, clerks and capitalists, most of the 'deviates' and 'degenerates' of the French Quarter of New Orleans, and keeps right on gathering momentum until it sweeps away everything, including the most innocent of bystanders, the reader, in its path" (Washington Post). The book "has a sad history behind it. The author sent it to every publisher in America, all of whom rejected it. After the final rejection (by Knopf) Toole committed suicide. He was only 32. His mother gave the manuscript to Walker Percy, who secured its publication by Louisiana State University Press, and it was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Its virtues have now been universally recognized" (Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels, 125). "A masterwork of comedy… A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities …. nothing less than a grand comic fugue" (New York Times). First-state dust jacket, without Chicago Sun-Times blurb on the rear panel.

Book and dust jacket in fine condition. An exceptionally nice copy, signed by Percy.