The Neon Bible

The accomplished and evocative first novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces . John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript was finally published twenty years after Toole’s death. The Neon Bible opens with the narrator, a young man named David, on a train, leaving the small Southern town he’s grown up in for the first time. What unspools is the tender and tragic coming-of-age story of a lonely child, a story that revolves around David’s unorthodox friendship with his great-aunt Mae – a former stage performer who is fiercely at odds with the conservative townspeople – and the everyday toll of living in an environment of religious fanaticism. 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.