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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780802132079
ISBN number: 0802132073
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: January 12, 1994
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 300283
Studio: Grove Press
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Product Description:
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. 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 very 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.
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Rated by buyers 
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That the 16 y.o. John Kennedy Toole could have written a novel with this level of human insight is...frightening. Yes, the story though entertaining is necessarily imperfect. More important, though, is that fact that a boy who was little more than a child had such deep understanding of the human condition. He understands things about us that few people many times his age understand. It's almost as if he knew something...knew too much...and his knowledge killed him.
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
Rated by buyers -
This is a great book! It's not very long so its the kind of book you'll pick up and get really into and finish in a couple days.
Rated by buyers 
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First of all, for anyone to have written a novel like this at age sixteen is nothing short of amazing. Granted, some of the description does not entirely ring true, but for a teenager to possess such acuity when it comes to people and society is remarkable. John Kennedy Toole was such a gifted observer of humanity's foibles despite his young age that "The Neon Bible" contains truths and witticisms that most writers double, and even triple his age could only hope to aspire to. Tragically, there also seems to be a world-weary edge to the novel that no sixteen year-old should have to bear, a burdensome cynicism that undoubtedly contributed to Toole's tragic suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two.
Toole is best remembered for his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces (Evergreen Book) - which his mother succeeded in publishing a few years after her son's suicide. While he had tried (and failed) to get "Confederacy" published during his lifetime, Toole never intended for "The Neon Bible" to see print; he thought that it was too juvenile. But after "Confederacy" became a raging sucess Toole's family began to see dollar signs and, following a crass legal battle with Toole's mother, who sought to carry out her son's wishes, "The Neon Bible" was cleared for publication in 1989. The legal ordeal is outlined in the novel's introduction by W. Kenneth Holditch, who inherited the rights to "The Neon Bible" after Toole's mother's death, and who eventually lost the fight to respect Toole's wishes.
In his introduction, Holditch hopes that the two novels Toole wrote in his lifetime will "constitute testament to a genius," and they certainly do. If nothing else, reading "The Neon Bible" will make you wish that its truly gifted author had had a long, storied career to explore the full range of his talent. Is "The Neon Bible" perfect? No. It is all promise - the promise of a developing talent that was broken with Toole's unfortunate suicide. Despite its mature insights, it hews too closely to the tried-and-true. Toole had not yet found his confidence as a writer, and so he presented a somewhat clichéd coming-of-age tale that breaks few boundaries and remains steadfastly in the zone of `safe' literature. It is worthy of note, of course, but primarily as the very first effort of an author who would later break many of the rules he adheres to so strictly here.
So let's give Toole an A for being so skilled so young, but let's give "The Neon Bible" a C+.
Rated by buyers -
J.K. Toole's work, written when he was 16 years old IS the great American novel. It should be studied by any serious student of English. Reading any of this man's limited work, strikes the heart with sadness at his early death. What volumes he could have produced!!!!!
Rated by buyers -
If you're an Arcade Fire fan and are buying this book, keep in mind that the band itself has stated that this book has nothing to do with their album Neon Bible.
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