John Kennedy Toole--who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces--wroteThe 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.