In a Box in the Closet…
Thelma Toole believed in the talent of her son, though no one else could see it. And as mothers are wont to do, she pestered important people to take a look at 'the marvelous thing' her darling baby boy had written. She was systematically ignored, brushed off, and swept aside for 11 long and pitiable years. But Thelma Toole never quit.
When she heard that Walker Percy was teaching a writing class at a university not far away, Thelma marched into his office, thrust the weary manuscript into his hands and proclaimed, “It's a masterpiece.” Politely, Percy looked at the first page. Strangely, he didn't hate it. Minutes later he was surprised to notice that he was already several pages into the story.
In 1980, Louisiana State University Press published the colorfully comic, raging satire Thelma's boy had written 20 years earlier. The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize. Millions of people have since found laughter among its pages.
But recognition came too late for Thelma's child. Weary of waiting for a publisher to bring his book to life, young John Kennedy Toole decided to take his own. His car was found outside Biloxi, Mississippi on March 26, 1969; a length of garden hose stretched from the exhaust pipe to where he sat inside.
As John Toole drove out of town for the last time, his typescript lay quietly in the top of a dark closet. The New York Times would later write of it, “A masterwork of comedy. The novel astonishes with its inventiveness, it lives in the play of its voices. A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.” The Chicago Sun Times would echo, “What a delight, what a roaring, rollicking, footstomping wonder this book is. I laughed until my sides ached, and then I laughed on.” Then The Washington Post threw gas on the fire, “A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book.” But the ultimate praise came when Rolling Stone wrote, “A Confederacy of Dunces has been reviewed almost everywhere, and every reviewer has loved it. For once, everyone is right.” But John Kennedy Toole never read those words.
He hid his book where we might find it. But he hid his life where we cannot.
I tell you this story not to bewail the tragedy of young John Kennedy Toole and his long-delayed Confederacy of Dunces but to herald one simple question: How many other Pulitzer-worthy efforts lie buried in drawers because there is no Thelma Toole to be their champion? What if Louisiana State University Press had said “no” like all the other publishers? These are the thoughts that haunt me, and the reasons why Wizard Academy Press exists.
Most people have a book in them. And like John Kennedy Toole they believe, “It could never really happen. I'm just a hopeful amateur.” But in the words of Richard Bach, “A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”
You haven't quit, have you?
Roy H. Williams
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