A Confederacy of Dunces

Seventeenth (and last) printing of the First Edition. [1999]. Pp. [xii], 338. Publisher's beige cloth-covered boards, lettered in black to spine. Foreword by Walker Percy. Jacket cover art by Ed Lindlof (priced $24.95 to front flap). Excerpts originally appeared in New Orleans Review, V (1978).

An immaculate copy.

A Burgess 99 title, which is itself drawn from Jonathan Swift's essay 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." Winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, one of only two Pulitzers awarded posthumously. The madcap misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, overweight, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives with his mother in the French Quarter of 1960s New Orleans.

The author's first novel, published 11 years after his death, through the unflagging efforts of his formidable mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, who badgered author Walker Percy into submission and he agreed to read the manuscript, declaring it ''a major achievement, a huge comic-satiric-tragic one-of-a-kind rendering of life in New Orleans.''

Rejected by every North American publisher he send it to, Toole had committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31 after the final rejection by Knopf. In 1980 Louisiana State University Press agreed to take a chance with a first printing of just 2,500 copies. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts helped defray the cost. It sold about 50,000 copies in hardback and nearly 600,000 in paperback within three years of publication. "A masterwork of comedy." –The New York Times Book Review