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1980 novel by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel by American writer John Kennedy Toole that was published in 1980, 11 years after Toole's death. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who contributed a foreword) and Toole's mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 and is now a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States. The book's title refers to an epigram 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." Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self styled scholar. He is an educated but slothful 30 year old living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early 1960s New Orleans. In his quest for employment, he has adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. Toole wrote the first draft in 1963 during his last few months in Puerto Rico. Critics liked the accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial. Reilly resembled Toole; Toole's experiences served as inspiration for episodes. While at Tulane University, Toole filled in for a friend as a hot tamale cart vendor and worked for a family who owned and operated a clothing factory.

Ignatius Jacques Reilly is an overweight and unemployed 30 year old with a master's degree in Medieval History. He lives with his mother, Irene Reilly. He loathes the world, which he feels has lost the values of geometry and theology. One afternoon Reilly's mother drives him "downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor's seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein's for his trumpet and a new string for his lute." While Reilly waits for his mother, Officer Angelo Mancuso approaches Reilly and demands that Ignatius produce identification. Affronted and outraged by Mancuso's zeal and officiousness, Reilly protests his innocence to the crowd while denouncing the city's vices and the graft of the local police. An elderly man, Claude Robichaux, takes Reilly's side and denounces Mancuso and the police as communists. In the resulting uproar, Mancuso arrests Robichaux while Reilly and his embarrassed mother escape and take refuge in a bar. There, Mrs. Reilly drinks too much. On the way home, she crashes her car. The bills for the accident total $1,020, a sizable amount of money in early 1960s New Orleans and which would be a little over $10,000 in 2023. To help his mother pay for the accident, Ignatius must work for the first time in years. What follows is a series of adventures that introduce characters and their interactions as Ignatius flounders from one low wage job to another. Ignatius obsesses over his wardrobe, verbally abuses his mother, and frequents movie theaters, where he condemns the actors and actresses. The novel explores the psyche of a man who, every time he feels stress, observes the action of his pyloric valve. Reilly maintains an adversarial relationship, and possibly a flirtation, with the politically liberal Myrna Minkoff, his only friend from college.

Ignatius Jacques Reilly is something of a modern Don Quixote—eccentric, idealistic, and creative, sometimes to the point of delusion. However, he also enjoys many modern comforts and conveniences and is given to claiming that the rednecks of rural Louisiana hate all modern technology, which they associate with unwanted change. The workings of his pyloric valve play an important role in his life, reacting strongly to incidents in a fashion that he likens to Cassandra in terms of prophetic significance. Ignatius believes he does not belong in the world and that his failings are the work of some higher power. He refers to the goddess Fortuna as having spun him downward on her wheel of fortune. Ignatius loves to eat; his masturbatory fantasies lead in strange directions. His mockery of obscene images is portrayed as a defensive posture to hide their titillating effect on him. Although considering himself to have an expansive and learned worldview, Ignatius has an aversion to ever leaving the town of his birth and frequently bores friends and strangers with the story of his abortive journey out of New Orleans, to Baton Rouge on a Greyhound Scenicruiser, which Ignatius recounts as a traumatic ordeal of extreme horror.

Myrna Minkoff, referred to by Ignatius as "that minx," is a Jewish beatnik from New York City. Ignatius met her while she was in college in New Orleans. In another passage, Ignatius declines to see another film, a "widely praised Swedish drama about a man who was losing his soul". This is most likely Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, released in early 1963. In another passage, Irene Reilly recalls the night Ignatius was conceived: after she and her husband viewed Red Dust, released in October 1932.

The book is famous for its rich depiction of New Orleans and the city's dialects, including Yat. Many locals and writers think that it is the best and most accurate depiction of the city in a work of fiction. A bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly can be found under the clock on the down river side of the 800 block of Canal Street, New Orleans, the former site of the D. H. Holmes Department Store, now the Hyatt French Quarter Hotel. The statue mimics the opening scene: Ignatius waits for his mother under the D. H. Holmes clock, clutching a Werlein's shopping bag, dressed in a hunting cap, flannel shirt, baggy pants and scarf, 'studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste.' The statue is modeled on New Orleans actor John "Spud" McConnell, who portrayed Ignatius in a stage version of the novel. Various local businesses are mentioned in addition to D. H. Holmes, including Werlein's Music Store and local cinemas such as the Prytania Theater. Some readers from elsewhere assume Ignatius's favorite soft drink, Dr. Nut, to be fictitious, but it was an actual local soft drink brand of the era. The "Paradise Hot Dogs" vending carts are an easily recognized satire of those actually branded "Lucky Dogs".

The structure of A Confederacy of Dunces reflects the structure of Ignatius's favorite book, Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. Like Boethius' book, A Confederacy of Dunces is divided into chapters that are further divided into a varying number of subchapters. Key parts of some chapters are outside of the main narrative. In Consolation, sections of narrative prose alternate with metrical verse. In Confederacy, such narrative interludes vary more widely in form and include light verse, journal entries by Ignatius, and also letters between himself and Myrna. A copy of The Consolation of Philosophy within the narrative itself also becomes an explicit plot device in several ways.

As outlined in the introduction to a later revised edition, the book would never have been published if Toole's mother had not found a smeared carbon copy of the manuscript left in the house following Toole's 1969 death at 31. She was persistent despite rejections. Thelma repeatedly telephoned Walker Percy, an author and college instructor at Loyola University New Orleans, and demanded that he read it. He initially resisted; however, as he recounts in the book's foreword:
the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading. In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. The book was published by LSU Press in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. In 2005, Blackstone Audio released an unabridged audiobook of the novel, read by Barrett Whitener. While Tulane University in New Orleans retains a collection of Toole's papers, and some early drafts have been found, the location of Toole's last manuscript is unknown.

In March 1984, LSU staged a musical adaptation of the book, with book and lyrics by Frank Galati and music by Edward Zelnis; actor Scott Harlan played Ignatius. Kerry Shale read the book for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in 1982, and later adapted the book into a one man show which he performed at the Adelaide Festival in 1990, at the Gate Theatre in London, and for BBC Radio. There have been repeated attempts to turn the book into a film. In 1982, Harold Ramis was to write and direct an adaptation, starring John Belushi as Ignatius and Richard Pryor as Burma Jones, but Belushi's death prevented this. Later, John Candy and Chris Farley were touted for the lead, but both of them, like Belushi, also died at an early age, leading many to ascribe a curse to the role of Ignatius. Director John Waters was interested in directing an adaptation that would have starred Divine, who also died at an early age, as Ignatius. British performer and writer Stephen Fry was at one point commissioned to adapt Toole's book for the screen. He was sent to New Orleans by Paramount Pictures in 1997 to get background for a screenplay adaptation. John Goodman, a longtime resident of New Orleans, was slated to play Ignatius at one point. A version adapted by Steven Soderbergh and Scott Kramer, and slated to be directed by David Gordon Green, was scheduled for release in 2005. The film was to star Will Ferrell as Ignatius and Lily Tomlin as Irene. A staged reading of the script took place at the 8th Nantucket Film Festival, with Ferrell as Ignatius, Anne Meara as Irene, Paul Rudd as Officer Mancuso, Kristen Johnston as Lana Lee, Mos Def as Burma Jones, Rosie Perez as Darlene, Olympia Dukakis as Santa Battaglia and Miss Trixie, Natasha Lyonne as Myrna, Alan Cumming as Dorian Greene, John Shea as Gonzales, Jesse Eisenberg as George, John Conlon as Claude Robichaux, Jace Alexander as Bartender Ben, Celia Weston as Miss Annie, Miss Inez & Mrs. Levy, and Dan Hedaya as Mr. Levy. Various reasons are cited as to why the Soderbergh version has yet to be filmed. They include disorganization and lack of interest at Paramount Pictures, the murder of Helen Hill, the head of the Louisiana State Film Commission, and the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. In 2012, there was a version in negotiation with director James Bobin and potentially starring Zach Galifianakis. In a 2013 interview, Steven Soderbergh remarked "I think it's cursed. I'm not prone to superstition, but that project has got bad mojo on it." In November 2015, Huntington Theatre Company introduced a stage version of A Confederacy of Dunces written by Jeffrey Hatcher in their Avenue of the Arts/BU Theatre location in Boston, starring Nick Offerman as Ignatius J. Reilly. It set a record as the company's highest grossing production.

On November 5, 2019, BBC News included A Confederacy of Dunces on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.