John Kennedy Toole
Paperback | Pages: 162 pages Rating: 3.71 | 5807 Users | 446 Reviews
Details About Books The Neon Bible
| Title | : | The Neon Bible |
| Author | : | John Kennedy Toole |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 162 pages |
| Published | : | January 12th 1994 by Grove Press (first published 1989) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Novels. Literature. American |
Commentary During Books The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.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.
Define Books As The Neon Bible
| Original Title: | The Neon Bible |
| ISBN: | 0802132073 (ISBN13: 9780802132079) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating About Books The Neon Bible
Ratings: 3.71 From 5807 Users | 446 ReviewsDiscuss About Books The Neon Bible
Toole committed suicide at the age of 32, leaving behind two unpublished novels and an impressively determined mother who succeeded after much badgering in gaining the novelist Walker Percys interest and support in the manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces. As we know, this was then published to instant and great acclaim and has been continuously in print ever since, and translated into numerous languages.While The Neon Bible was in fact written before A Confederacy of Dunces, it only came toI happened on this book in the library recently. The author's story intrigued me, so I checked it out. Toole wrote only one published work and then took his own life at the young age of 31. "The Neon Bible" was published posthumously. Strikingly, it was written when he was only 16. That alone makes it a compelling read. How such a young boy could grasp such depth of feeling! It's a short read and I was drawn along easily. I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that there is much food for
John Kennedy Toole was 16 years old when he wrote this novel. Its one of only two novels he completed in his lifetime, the other being the better known A Confederacy of Dunces. I remember a young girl in one of the writers groups I belong to, who asked once if we could take a young writer seriously. As I recall most of the people told the girl they would, if the writing was good. This is the novel I think I would recommend to anyone that cant take a young writers seriously because of their age.
I read a number of books written from the perspective of teenagers and most of the were cringy. It took a lot of suspension of disbelief from my part to actually read the words as thought and delivered by teens. Teens have a certain interior world which we tend to forget pretty fast once we grow up. And I think this is why I liked this book so much. It was believe-able, it was raw, it was authentic. It was probably not easy at all to write, since, apart from being narrated from a 16-year-old's
This is one of the most surprising books I have ever read. Though I was already aware of Toole's genius, because of Confederacy of Dunces, I went into it wondering just how great it could be. He wrote this story when he was 16, and I thought the only reason it was published was because of his Mother's struggle to get it published. They say you aren't fully appreciated until your gone. In the introduction of this book, a family friend of Toole's mother discusses how the two found the story shorty
John Kennedy Toole's first novel (published posthumously) is not too dissimilar from today's YA novels: A boy disillusioned with society, tries to escape it but it never happens.It is a depressing book and yet so powerful. Don't forget that Toole was 16 when he wrote this and it is precocious. However it is definitely a sign of his talents as a writer and his ability to be viciously satirical. Later on when Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces he developed a funny bone and that suited him more
Yeah, I've placed this on the back-burner a several times before. Why? Since "Confederacy" takes up such a large portion of my heart, my soul, I absolutely knew in my bones that this, Toole's first effort into novel-writing (& the only other one-- he wrote solely two), would suck. Of course it would. And the beginning trembles, and the plot is thin, and the observations somewhat... pedestrian? But it is nonetheless exactly what John Kennedy Toole fans like myself would die for: testament of
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