Why the unexpected death of John Kennedy Toole was a great loss to the world

This is the story of a man who, after his death, achieved fame international and today his work is still seeking great enjoyment galore people around the world.

a man parked his car in a secluded place, just outside the town of Biloxi, in Mississippi, not far from the Gulf of Mexico href=”https://hipertextual.com/tag/mexico”. Left a note in sight “for parents” and the engine idling, he alighted, introduced the end of a hose through the back window after it is connected to the exhaust pipe, he returned inside the vehicle and waited for carbon monoxide him numb and ended his life. It was March 1969; the man was only thirty-one and was called John Kennedy Toole, someone who could never know that then would pass one of the best times of his life to many people in the world, and surely and forever, one and again, generations as they happen.

the just struggle of a mother shattered

Thelma Toole, a dominant and overprotective mother did not allow him to play with other children, John defined as “a treasure” and really was. He was born in New Orleans in 1937, when she was forty way, after doctors had insisted that in no way would be able to conceive one child. He possessed a great intelligence, excelled in creativity and showed himself a pupil: he completed two years of once in elementary school, and later won a scholarship to Tulane University, where he graduated with honors in 1958, and she enrolled at the New York Columbia University to study English Literature Thelma Toole. “Whenever publishers back at me ‘a Confederacy of Dunces’ it was as if he dies me little “

But returned to his home state in 1959 to work as an assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, located in Lafayette, and in 1960 became the youngest professor history of Hunter College of New York href=”https://hipertextual.com/2016/03/ciudades-de-cine”, with twenty-two, while trying to study a doctorate at Columbia. However, he was called to the ranks of the Army in 1961 and spent a couple of years training in English to Spanish-speaking soldiers from Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico. After that, he refused to return to Hunter, returned to his city, taught at the Dominican College and enrolled in a Ph.D. Tulane. In 1963, things started to go wrong, and five years later, John committed suicide.

According to Kenneth account Holditch, emeritus professor of literature at the University of New Orleans who befriended Thelma since 1980, the woman was depressed after the death of his son and living with her poor husband, “isolated on deafness” until found among the belongings of John the manuscript of a novel that had started writing in Fort Buchanan, who had concluded after his return to New Orleans and had unsuccessfully tried to publish. So Thelma, his sixty-seven autumns, the blanket to the head mess and suggested that was published over the next five years Walker Percy. “I kept reading. and followed him and followed him. it was not possible that the novel was so good “

Up to eight publishers rejected obtuse throughout that time. “Every time I returned,” said Thelma, “was like I died a little.” Her husband died and her own health then went bankrupt. But in 1976, he knew that the writer Walker Percy was teaching at the University of Loyola, and as he explains, one day he began receiving calls from Thelma in which he insisted that would read the manuscript John, which he did reluctantly, but something happened: “… I kept reading,” recalls Percy. “And I went and I followed. First, with the grim feeling that was not bad enough to leave; then with an itch of interest; then with growing excitement and finally, incredulously. could not possibly be as good “

And he was, and his laughter sometimes made him the object of stares bewildered those present while I read it. So he had no choice but to convince the Louisiana State University that he should publish it, which happened in 1980. The following year, the novel was brokered in Pulitzer Prize and, in France, the best novel in a foreign language. He did not deserve less wonderful as A Confederacy of Dunces .

From ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ to ‘The Neon Bible’

Holditch reports that, thanks to the success of the novel and despite his poor health, Thelma became more expansive and, “in his public appearances staged scenes of the novel, he spoke of his son, played the piano and sang old songs” and assured she “remained in the world for his son,” John wretch, who had sent the novel to the Simon and Schuster publishing house in 1963, and its literary editor, Robert Gottlieb, began to encourage him, for review and amend it in repeatedly until John, tired of change, lost hope of seeing it on paper, and sank.

it must be the most infuriating to know that one has in hand an absolute masterpiece as A Confederacy of fools and, to paraphrase Jonathan Swift fragment from which came his extraordinary title, all editorial fools conjure against his genius. Because this novel is an immeasurable and maddened modern satire, but always lucid, in which almost all the characters are revealed as a special -in amazing find, of course, the colossal Ignatius J. Reilly, at no time it sensed one of the absurdities that will happen and I swear that, as he well knew Percy, come to mourn with laughter while reading. almost all the characters in ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ is revealed as an amazing discovery; especially the colossal Ignatius J. Reilly

John had already spent a good season drinking too much alcohol in Fort Buchanan, because there was the custom among the soldiery of how affordable and abundant it was, and after editorial wallop with a Confederacy of Dunces , which was “something of his soul,” John again get drunk, began to suffer severe headaches that could not remedy and light paranoid thoughts and persecutory a growing hobby, concretized once when George Deaux, another writer, he wanted to steal his novel to publish it under his own name.

his appearance deteriorated rapidly, became erratic in his explanations at the university, which took a leave of absence, and came to look at the family home hidden mind-reading devices. In January 1969, he disappeared, and Thelma was never heard from him until the police came to tell in March that had taken his own life on the outskirts of Biloxi. She destroyed the suicide note after reading it, and has only given vague explanations on its contents: “ravings of a madman,” he said containing once. And John was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans.

what counts Joel L. Fletcher, a friend of John, Thelma Toole, it seems that had brought machaconamente your child with a high degree of self-esteem, demands and hopes that awaited him a very important future, an irony of the most tragic for which maybe tolerance John to prolonged frustration that Gotlieb not accept his novel exigua was enough to make him lose the serenity and even mental health. But there is no doubt that despite the mistakes Thelma could make in your relationship with your child, redeemed himself after his struggle so that the world would enjoy his masterpiece. Perhaps’ A Confederacy of fools’ is the best American novel of all time

However, she did not end there because, after the triumph of a Confederacy of Dunces I came up with another novel by John typewritten and made every effort to ensure that their laws did not draw slice of publication, preventing it from first and appointing Holditch guardian of it after in his will, committed he had to play in vain when Thelma died in 1984.

So, after several years of litigation, the neon Bible was released in 1989, and readers around the globe could confirm that John Kennedy Toole was really a genius who had written with only sixteen something as mature as this novel about the childhood and early youth in an intolerant southern town and, ten years later, he had concluded a Confederacy of Dunces , which could be the best American novel or at least one of them no doubt, and that think about what wonders could have writing not to have killed himself notes the great loss this was for the world.

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