A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (Diego Trejo).

John Kennedy Toole was thirty-one when he committed suicide in 1969. He only wrote two novels: The Neon Bible (1954) and A Confederacy of Dunces (1964) (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981), both published posthumously. Nowadays, he is regarded (despite his scant literary corpus), among Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, as one of the best authors that has ever come up from the south of the U.S.

He was born in New Orleans in the middle of a depressing homely environment, an atmosphere indulged by his obsessive mother Thelma Ducoing Toole. She played a big role in his life, introducing him to literature, poetry, music, theater (art in general) and, in a way, filling the role of an intrusive guide who, indirectly, managed almost every aspect of her son's life. 

Quickly involved in the academic life of Louisiana, John Kennedy Toole worked in a handful of universities around the area before he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961. He spent two years in Puerto Rico teaching English to illiterate recruits and, at the same time, he began to write A Confederacy of Dunces.
After his return to the U.S., still working as a professor, he completed his novel and started to look for an editor and a publishing house. Unable to find any interest in his literary work, he fell into depression and started to drink heavily, an habit that led to a chronic stage of paranoia, delusion, and, ultimately, his death.

A Confederacy of Dunces follows the path of Ignatius J. Reilly, "an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters." (Yes, I got this from Wikipedia. How am I supposed to know the details of the novel if I haven't read it?)

What do I expect from the book? A writer at the peak of his genius who, unfortunately, died way too soon.