Learning a little bit about New Orleans

If you're here, you probably know a thing or two about A Confederacy of Dunces and Ignatius J. Reilly. If you don't, please stay, read a bit, and then pick up the book.
A Confederacy of Dunces was written by John Kennedy Toole in the mid- and late-1960's and he committed suicide in 1969, before the book was published. Its tragic that we lost such a talented writer before his genius was even recognized. His mother took the manuscript to Walker Percy, a professor at Loyola University, and asked him for his help in getting it published. Percy had seen plenty of unpublished manuscripts and was frankly skeptical that this one would be any better than the stack of underwhelming novels he had already seen. What Percy found was that the deeper he read, the more he liked it. Percy helped Toole's mother get it published andConfederacy went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.