A Confederacy of Dunces

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, is huge, obese, fractious, fastidious (eccentric and finicky about cleanliness), a latter-day Gargantua (Gargantua was a giant from Francois Rabelais' satirical novel Gargantua and Pantagruel), a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans lower depths (low socioeconomic status or poverty), incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures (journeying through hardship to achieve a happy ending).