Winner of the 1981 Pullitzer Prize for Fiction. New Orleans in the early 1960s: Ignatius J. Reilly is a grotesque, unemployed man living with his mother. He is a frequent cinema-goer, where he stuffs himself with popcorn and Milky Ways and shouts at the screen. His mother claims he was conceived in the 1930s one night after she and her husband had gone to see the film Red Dust starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In the extract below, Reilly has gone to the Prytania cinema and watches a circus musical (recognisable as Billy Rose’s Jumbo starring Doris Day). “This is going to be even worse than I thought,” Ignatius said when he saw the elephant.’

Later, Reilly goes to a matinee screening at the Orpheum of another Doris Day film – from the description in the novel, the romantic comedy That Touch of Mink (Dir: Delbert Mann US 1962) co-starring Cary Grant. In a soft-focus love scene, Reilly starts to lose control: “Oh, my God. Who can imagine how wrinkled and loathsome those two really are? I think I’m getting nauseated. Can someone in the projection booth turn off the electricity? Please!”

In another section, Ignatius decides against seeing another film, a ‘widely praised Swedish drama about a man who was losing his soul’ – probably Winter Light directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1963.

John Kennedy Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early 1960s but after failing to get it published, committed suicide in 1969. It was published posthumously with the support of Walker Percy, author of The Moviegoer, also set in New Orleans.