The Neon Bible, authored by John Kennedy Toole, was originally published during 1989 and was later published during 1994 by Grove Press. This book is centered on David, a rather dramatic and peculiar boy living in a small town within the South during the 1940s. Toole explores the complicated depths of this character as he explores the bittersweet episodes of his own life.
It's worth noting Toole wrote this novel for a literary contest when his was sixteen-years-old, which is something many readers admire. Such readers are impressed with this early testament of literary brilliance, while other readers feel this novel was crafted with naive intentions and is somewhat over-hyped.
Toole let his novels, including A Confederacy of Dunces, remain unpublished during his lifetime. Yet The Neon Bible was finally published twenty years after his death and thirty-five years after officially being written. Toole is a winner of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
