New Bio: John Kennedy Toole

Butterfly in the Typewriter, a new biography of John Kennedy Toole by Cory MacLauchlin, is due for release later this month.

Its full title is Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, and it's out on March 27, 2012.

John Kennedy Toole

Mark your calendars.

A Confederacy of Dunces has been one of my favorite novels for more years than I care to acknowledge. I read an earlier biography of Toole called Ignatius Rising and was underwhelmed. And according to a memoir by Toole's friend Joel Fletcher (Ken and Thelma), that biography is at best hackwork. I strongly suggest you avoid it. The less said of it, the better.

I was so intrigued by the forthcoming Butterfly that I contacted its author a year or so ago. Mr. MacLauchlin kindly wrote back and we corresponded briefly. One of the things I was keen to know was, How much of Toole's archived material survived Hurricane Katrina?

"I [spent] a week in the Toole Papers at Tulane," he wrote back, "digitizing almost everything in the collection for this project...on my first day I overheard some archivists discussing their massive loss of 19th century newspapers. I asked them the same question you asked me.  They told me that all the Toole papers were a couple inches from the flood water."

Whew!

There appears to have been some materials that would have been pertinent to this project that were in fact lost. Not surprising, but still a great pity.

For more about the book, see Cory MacLauchlin's official web site.