TOOLE, John Kennedy (1937-1969). A Confederacy of Dunces. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

8vo. Original cloth; in unrestored unclipped dust jacket (very light rubbing to spine).

FIRST EDITION IN FIRST STATE DUST JACKET with Walker Percy blurb on rear. A Confederacy of Dunces was printed 11 years after the author, disappointed over the lack of progress in getting it published, committed suicide. It was only after an intense lobbying campaign by Toole's mother that the author Walker Percy, impressed by the book's content, helped usher it to publication. Anthony Burgess would later write of the work, "Its virtues have now been universally recognized... New Orleans can never be the same after Toole's comic masterpiece" (Burgess, 99 Novels, 125). A Confederacy of Dunces would go on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.