In 1981, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer for fiction. But Toole had died by then—he was not alive even when his book was published!
A Confederacy of Dunces
Toole wrote about “the picaresque adventures of the hot-dog-touting slob Ignatius J Reilly,” writes Sam Jordison, an executive in a publishing house, in the Guardian. Toole’s manuscript caught the attention of a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, Richard Gottlieb, the same man who discovered Catch-22
But two years later, Gottlieb told Toole that he couldn’t publish the book. The author was disappointed. He began to exhibit signs of severe illness, Jordison adds. He became increasingly paranoid. About nine years after he finished the book, Toole killed himself
Mom to the rescue
Once Toole had decided that the book would never be published, he threw the manuscript on top of a cupboard in his bedroom. Two years after his death, his mother found the notes. And she spent another five years trying to get it published. Eventually she found a professor who agreed to read it.
Posthumous Pulitzer
The professor, Walker Percy, was impressed. He persuaded the Louisiana State University Press to print the book and wrote a foreword. And after three years, Percy published the book. It went on to win the Pulitzer