Ken & Thelma The Story Of A Confederacy Of Dunces

"The book is not autobiography; neither is it altogether invention. . . . I am not in the book; I've never pretended to be. But I am writing about things that I know, and in recounting these, it's difficult not to feel them."--John Kennedy Toole, on his then-unpublished novel, A Confederacy of DuncesBefore it won the Pulitzer Prize and became an international bestseller, A Confederacy of Dunces was a huge, challenging manuscript by an unknown New Orleans professor named John Kennedy Toole. In Ken and Thelma, author Joel L. Fletcher recalls, with the help of personal letters and his contemporary journals, his friendship with Toole--known as Ken--during the early 1960s, when Ken completed and tried to publish his masterpiece. Mr. Fletcher also writes revealingly about many of the people who influenced Ken, including Bobby Byrne, who many believe inspired the character of Ignatius Reilly; Robert Gottlieb, who championed, then rejected, the manuscript; and finally Thelma Ducoing Toole, whose perseverance in getting her son's novel published after his death is legendary.Fletcher, Joel is the author of 'Ken & Thelma The Story Of A Confederacy Of Dunces', published 2005 under ISBN 9781589802964 and ISBN 1589802969.