Book Club - Confederacy of Dunces

We will discuss the book Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.

Plan on covering the first 4 chapters of the book.

A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole. It was published in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also 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 considered 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."

A Confederacy of Dunces follows the misadventures of its protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, overweight, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who live