The Neon Bible

"A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century" that "belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty" ( Orlando Sentinel).   John Kennedy Toole—who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece  A Confederacy of Dunces—wrote The 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.   "Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose . . . a remarkable achievement." —Michiko Kakutani,  The New York Times   "John Kennedy Toole's tender, nostalgic side is as brilliantly effective as his corrosive satire. If you liked  To Kill A Mockingbird you will love  The Neon Bible." —Florence King   "Shockingly mature. . . . Even at sixteen, Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply." —Kerry Luft,  Chicago Tribune