Poem A Week #12: Washing Cars with John Kennedy Toole

PAW #12 is about John Kennedy Toole, the ill-fated would-be novelist whose book A Confederacy of Dunces was repeatedly rejected by publishers throughout his life, which Toole prematurely ended when he gassed himself in his car in Mississippi, aged 31. The novel was later published when the gatekeepers realised the error of their ways and Toole won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in the 1980s. That’ll teach them.

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