John Kennedy Toole is an enigma. He was bright young writer from New Orleans who for a time in the early 1960s taught at South Louisiana Institute — now called UL Lafayette — and was inspired by a fellow English instructor there, albeit a certifiably eccentric one, to create Ignatius J. Reilly, the equally eccentric Lucky Dog vendor and star of Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning stroke of genius, A Confederacy of Dunces.
In 1969, despairing after futile attempts to get the manuscript published, Toole used a garden hose attached to the tailpipe of his car on a roadside near Biloxi to commit suicide. Confederacy sat for another couple of years in his bedroom in New Orleans before his mother, after several years of repeated rejections from publishers, got the manuscript to author Walker Percy, then on the faculty at Loyola University. Percy shepherded Confederacy to publication in 1980. A year later Toole was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer for his comic masterwork set in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
Toole’s life and struggles are the focus of a fine new biography on the author — Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin. Subtitled “The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces,” MacLauchlin’s new book examines the many contradictions in Toole’s brief life — he was 31 when he killed himself — and the events that set him on a tragic trajectory.
This evening, just blocks away from where Toole taught, MacLauchlin will sign copies of Butterfly in the Typewriter. The event at Saint Street Inn, 407 Brook Ave. across St. Mary from Old Tyme Grocery, runs from 5-6 p.m.
In rendering his ruling, District Judge John Trahan all but called the real estate developer a liar for inconsistencies in his accounts of what prompted him to punch a school teacher unconscious.
Frank’s Casing Crew, now doing business as Frank’s International, will make its final appearance on ABiz’s list of the Top 50 Privately Held Companies in Acadiana this year, and once again it will likely be at the top with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The 75-year-old company specializing in tubular fabrication and installation services to the oil and gas industry plans to offer shares of its stock to the public for the first time.
The defeat, or rather highjacking of House Bill 420 in the final days of this year's Legislative Session, say Reps. Vincent Pierre and Terry Landry, is the result of the propaganda spread by one unidentified local media outlet and an unnamed former state Representative, but nothing to do with the original legislation's lack of checks, balances or details.
City-Parish Council Chairman Brandon Shelvin heaped steady doses of condescending ire on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana executive while failing to reveal his financial ties to a BC/BS rival.
Abbeville native David Primeaux was a popular professor until his death late last year, and while he was successful at camouflaging a dark past, he couldn’t outlive it.
Tehmi Chassion’s failure to recuse himself in the school board’s selection of a group health benefits provider raises ‘serious questions’ on whether he violated state ethics law.
He’s a singer. A songwriter. A piano man. A family man. He’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. He’s David Egan. And he knows ancient secrets about the monolithic stones of Stonehenge that he’s not willing to share.
John Kennedy Toole is an enigma. He was bright young writer from New Orleans who for a time in the early 1960s taught at South Louisiana Institute — now called UL Lafayette — and was inspired by a fellow English instructor there, albeit a certifiably eccentric one, to create Ignatius J. Reilly, the equally eccentric Lucky Dog vendor and star of Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning stroke of genius, A Confederacy of Dunces. 
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