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John Kennedy Toole (; December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. At 16 in 1954, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he shelved in the same year, not finding a willing publisher; he later dismissed it as "adolescent". Toole was a successful and popular professor, first at University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), then Hunter College, and finally St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans. Having persuaded Simon & Schuster to accept A Confederacy of Dunces, he was unable to resolve editorial disputes.