American · 1937–1969
John Kennedy Toole won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction posthumously with "A Confederacy of Dunces," a comic novel about an obese medievalist battling modernity in New Orleans. Toole committed suicide in 1969 after publishers rejected the manuscript; his mother's persistence eventually brought it to print through Walker Percy's advocacy. The novel became a cult classic and a testament to literary persistence.