John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans in 1937. He earned a B.A. at Tulane University and an M.A. in English at Columbia University, and he taught English at university level. He died in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1969, at the age of 31.
After his death his mother persuaded the novelist Walker Percy to read the manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces. It was published in 1980, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His early novel The Neon Bible, written in 1954, was published in 1989.
Source: Wikipedia