1980 A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES John Kennedy First Edition Hardcover Dust Jacket

1980 A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy. It is a  First Edition 5th printing.  The Dust Jacket has a piece missing on the top of the spine and other blemishes to the edges. It has been placed in a protective archival sleeve. The binding is sound and there aren't any obvious signs of inscriptions, marginalization, or dog eared pages.

Ignatius J. Reilly, is an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood  of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. In 1981, A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—a rare honor for a work of humor. The large, unwieldy, hilarious novel is made much more poignant by the knowledge that its author died believing it, and himself, was a hapless failure just like the main character in the novel. Though written in the 1960s, the novel wasn't published until 1980, eleven years after the suicide of John Kennedy Toole which may have been a result of not being able to publish his work.  The book is banned in India for its alleged blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed. If you are a collector of banned books, this book by one of the most famous failures in history is one you want on your library shelf.