by John Kennedy Toole · Penguin · tapa blanda · ISBN 9780140139877
VAT included
Hamelyn quality guarantee · checked and verified, or your money back
«The Neon Bible» is the novel by American writer John Kennedy Toole, published by Penguin in paperback (176 pages, in English).
David, a shy and poor boy, grows up as an outsider in a small town in the American South during the 1940s. Amid the religious fervour and appearances of his community, he witnesses the hypocrisy and prejudice around him, in a coming-of-age story that anticipates Toole's interest in marginal characters.
Written by Toole at sixteen, it remained unpublished until 1989. The cover presents it as the work of the author of A Confederacy of Dunces.
For readers of Southern fiction and coming-of-age stories, as well as those who want to discover Toole's origins.
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. At 16 in 1954, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he shelved in the same year, not finding a willing publisher; he later dismissed it as "adolescent". Toole was a successful and popular professor, first at University of Southwestern Louisiana, then Hunter College, and finally St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans. Having persuaded Simon & Schuster, however, to accept A Confederacy of Dunces, he was unable to resolve editorial disputes. Due in part to the novel's failure, he suffered from paranoia and depression, dying by suicide at the age of 31.
