A sprawling comic manuscript written in the early 1960s was rejected, sat in a box after its author’s death, and then won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. This episode dives into A Confederacy of Dunces, its New Orleans setting alive with working-class dialects and decaying atmosphere, and its protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly: 30 years old, master’s degree, unemployed, living with his mother, dressed in tweed trousers and a green hunting cap in the Louisiana heat, and devoted to the medieval philosopher Boethius and the Wheel of Fortune that absolves him of all responsibility.

We look at how John Kennedy Toole built Ignatius from a slovenly professor friend and his own jobs selling tamales and working in a clothing factory, the Jonathan Swift essay behind the title, and the plot set in motion by Irene Reilly’s drunken car crash: filing cabinets thrown out at Levy Pants, a failed worker uprising, a hot dog cart in a pirate costume, Burma Jones trapped by Jim Crow vagrancy laws, and a cockatoo attack. The episode follows the rejection that ground Toole down before his suicide in 1969 at 31, his mother Thelma’s relentless campaign that cornered Walker Percy, the 1980 publication by a university press, and the decades of doomed film adaptations.

• Why compulsively watching movies he hates is Ignatius’s psychological fortress against his own failure
• How the novel’s alternating narration, journal entries and hostile letters mirror The Consolation of Philosophy
• The contrast between a privileged man’s imagined oppression and Burma Jones’s real, state-enforced oppression
• Actors who died young, studio disarray and Hurricane Katrina in the story of one of the great unmade films
• Why a character of internal monologue resists the screen, and whether social media has made Ignatiuses of us all