John Kennedy Toole--who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his
best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces--wroteThe Neon
Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript
languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among
Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was
written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this
amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.