The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible
Author: John Kennedy Toole
Desc: 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.