
However, none of these made it very far, with the tragic passing of each of those comedians ensuring that the pause button would be pressed on this adaptation. From here, other notable comic legends like John Candy and Chris Farley were attached to the project in various forms. From there, his adventures take him across various forms of employment and interactions with outsized characters who could only exist in 1960s New Orleans.Īnd yet, despite the collapse of multiple iterations of the reproduction, Hollywood kept on pursuing a Confederacy of Dunces movie into the 1990s. While he fancies himself cut off from a world he despises, Reilly's mother eventually gets into a car accident, which means he must venture out into the world for employment so that he can take care of his mom. Reilly, a thirty-year-old man with a pessimistic outlook on the broader world. Its struggles to make it to bookshelves provided an eerie harbinger of the enormous and downright tragic challenges that have plagued any prospective film adaptation of this material.īefore we get into the cinematic takes on this book, though, it’s important to understand what the actual story of A Confederacy of Dunces is. More than a decade later, Dunces was finally published and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning hit.


The text wouldn’t have even seen the light of day if the mother of its author, John Kennedy Toole, hadn’t stumbled upon the manuscript after Toole’s suicide. The novel A Confederacy of Dunces has never had an easy existence.
