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John Kennedy Tool won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, A Confederacy of Dances, in 1981.

The problem is John Kennedy Tool killed himself in his car on an empty road in Biloxi, Mississippi

in 1969.

He was only 31 years old.

Tool began writing Dances after serving in the military in Puerto Rico.

He sent a manuscript to a renowned Simon and Juster editor, Robert Gottlieb, and Gottlieb

remarked that the novel was, quote, unquote, pointless.

The book, despite its wonderfulness, he wrote, isn't really about anything, and that's

something no one can do anything about, it is pointless.

What Gottlieb didn't predict was how stories about nothing in particular could speak to

us so profoundly, inspiring pop cultural phenomena like cheers, sign failed, and curbure

enthusiasm.

The two wrote letters back and forth with Tool trying to maintain patience and hope until

he couldn't any longer, and he killed himself.

Tool's mother found a smeared carbon copy of the manuscript left in the house following

his death.

She then took up the cause of getting her son's novel to the masses.

She tried a handful of more publishers over the next five years before cornering Walker

Percy, a author and college instructor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

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