High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which appeared in 1980, eleven years after Toole`s suicide. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a foreword) and Toole`s mother, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, and is now considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.