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Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. By Cory MacLauchlin. (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2012. Pp. [xvi], 319. Paper, $16.99, ISBN 978-0306-82191-2; cloth, $26.00, ISBN 978-0-306-82040-3.)
As Cory MacLauchlin's assiduously researched biography asserts, the life and suicide of John Kennedy Toole and the posthumous publication of his singular novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), have proved a captivating story in American literary history. Bom in 1937, the only child of descendants of Creole aristocracy and Irish immigrants, raised uptown but enthralled by the accents and foibles of fellow citizens from all parts of the city, Toole was New Orleanian to his core. Doing justice to the spirit of his beloved city in a satiric novel became Toole's obsession, but when Robert Gottlieb of Simon and Schuster demanded endless revisions to A Confederacy of Dunces, so the story goes, Toole abandoned the novel and, several years later, committed suicide. Having devoted her life to finding a publisher for her son's only book, Thelma Toole...