John Kennedy Toole--who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his
bestselling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces--wrote The Neon
Bible for a literary contest at the age of 16. The manuscript
languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among
Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, 35 years after it was written and 20
years after Toole's suicide at 31, that this amazingly accomplished and
evocative novel was freed for publication.