A posthumous comic masterpiece, rejected by every publisher in Toole's lifetime and pushed into print only by his mother's decade-long crusade, then awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, is one of the great grotesques of American literature: a medieval-minded, valve-obsessed glutton railing against the twentieth century from his mother's house in New Orleans. Walker Percy, who wrote the foreword, called it a gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy and confessed he kept expecting it to fall apart and it never did. The book endures as the definitive novel of the city, equal parts Rabelais, Don Quixote, and the failed crank as holy fool.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.