Nut (a then popular New Orleans soft drink), eats too much, and complains constantly about his troublesome pyloric valve. Ignatius spends his time writing either long philosophical screeds, combative letters to his one time fellow student/sworn enemy/almost girlfriend Myrna Minkoff, or accounts of his everyday travails on Big Chief notepads. He is a fat man of about 30, well educated but unwilling to work, discontented with everything about the modern world (he is fond of advocating a return to the monarchy.) He lives at home with his mother, his father having died long before. Reilly is the antihero, though in reality the novel is an ensemble work (and pretty much everyone is more "anti" than "hero".) But Ignatius is the fulcrum.
(Only two other writers have won a posthumous Pulitzer in Fiction, and the other two were also distinctly Southern writers: James Agee, from Tennessee, and William Faulkner, from Mississippi (make of that what you will.)) The Neon Bible, a novel Toole wrote when he was 16, heavily influenced by Flannery O'Connor (speaking of Southern writers), was later published. He eventually managed to convince LSU Press to publish it - it appeared in 1980, was a critical success, eventually a bestseller, and it won the Pulitzer. Percy, in his introduction, recounts his fear that the novel would be the usual horrid thing and his growing disappointment that it was good enough he had to keep reading, succeeded by shock as he realized it was actually quite remarkable. His mother (who, one imagines, perhaps unfairly, was not always a benign influence on him) remained convinced of his genius, and eventually barged into the office of the great Louisiana novelist (and SF writer!) Walker Percy. Increasingly mentally ill, Toole committed suicide at the age of 31. He revised it several times with the advice of the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, but Gottlieb eventually passed. at Columbia (he never completed this degree.) He was drafted into the Army and posted to Puerto Rico, where he began working on A Confederacy of Dunces. He spent time teaching at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and also at Hunter College in New York, while he worked on a Ph. John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969), a native of New Orleans, graduate of Tulane with a Master's from Columbia.
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