John Kennedy Toole

Alexandre Fachard (University of Geneva)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 17 Dec 1937
Died 26 Mar 1969
Activity c. 1962-1969

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Toole's Works

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John Kennedy Toole was born on 17 December 1937 in New Orleans. His father, John Dewey Toole Jr. (b. 1899 – d. 1972), was a car salesman of Irish ancestry; his mother, Thelma Agnes Ducoing (b. 1901 – d. 1984), a music and theatre teacher of Irish and French Creole lineage. Both parents grew up in New Orleans’s shabby genteel, mixed Faubourg Marigny, one block away from each other. They were married in 1926; by the time their son was born, almost ten years later, a certain bitterness had grown between them. Thelma Toole found that her husband, a good student who had been awarded a full scholarship to Louisiana State University but had turned it down to sell cars, was an underachiever. And she despised his “vulgarian” family – “Unworthy people, hairdressers and the like . . .…

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2672 words

Citation: Fachard, Alexandre. "John Kennedy Toole". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 July 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13741, accessed 23 November 2024.]