So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction.

The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pultizer Prize�winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans. This book has become an American comic masterpiece.