Upon reaching adulthood, both Ignatius and Toole spent several years at universities, earning prestigious degrees and teaching classes, although neither achieved success during his lifetime. Like his protagonist, the author spent his childhood under the thumb of a dominating matriarch.
Reilly appears to be modeled largely on Toole himself. The book's title is derived from a sentence in Jonathan Swift's "Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting": "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Since then, the book has sold more than 1.5 million copies in 18 languages, has won the Pulitzer Prize (1981), and has been adapted in preparation for a possible film.
Percy immediately fell in love with the novel, and it was published in 1980, with Percy providing the foreword. Following Toole's suicide, his mother sought out author Walker Percy and insisted that he read the manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces. Neither book was published during Toole's lifetime. A Confederacy of Dunces is one of two novels written by John Kennedy Toole, the other being The Neon Bible, which he wrote at age 16.
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