Butterfly in the Typewriter cover art

Butterfly in the Typewriter

The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces

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Butterfly in the Typewriter

By: Cory MacLauchlin
Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
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About this listen

The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. After writing A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster for two years. Exhausted from Gottlieb’s suggested revisions, Toole declared the publication of the manuscript hopeless and stored it in a box. Years later he suffered a mental breakdown, took a two-month journey across the United States, and finally committed suicide on an inconspicuous road outside of Biloxi. Following the funeral, Toole’s mother discovered the manuscript. After many rejections, she cornered Walker Percy, who found it a brilliant novel and spearheaded its publication. In 1981, 12 years after the author’s death, A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize.

In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.

©2012 Cory MacLauchlin (P)2013 Audible, Inc. Art & Literature Authors Literary History & Criticism United States World Literature
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very interesting if you are going to read a confederacy of dunces which isn't unfortunately on audible yet.

good storey

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There is hardly any more information on John Kennedy Toole here than you would find with a quick glance at his Wiki page.
Cory Maclaughlin spends more of his energy vindicating some and allocating blame to others to explain Toole's suicide, accusing other authors of having a lack of evidence for their opinions whilst he himself has hardly any.
He seemed to slap Toole's wrist for his behaviour when trying to get published even though Mr Maclaughlin has ridden the coat tails of Toole to get his own book published. There also are many bad and rather unnecessarily attempts to emulate Toole's poetic prose style. All in all OK but not very informative. Mostly assertion rather than fact.

Poorly researched.

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