# The Neon Bible

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/john-kennedy-toole/the-neon-bible/9781611854985

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![The Neon Bible](https://quivercdn.com/covers/grove-press-uk/john-kennedy-toole/the-neon-bible_978-16-1185-498-5.jpg?v=2026-05-23%2006%3A29%3A12)

- Book: [The Neon Bible](https://www.bookquiver.com/john-kennedy-toole/the-neon-bible) ([The Neon Bible.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/john-kennedy-toole/the-neon-bible.md))
- Authors: [John Kennedy Toole](https://www.bookquiver.com/john-kennedy-toole)
- Publisher: Grove Press UK
- ISBN: 978-16-1185-498-5
- Published: 2019-05-02
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

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.