Noting that [A Confederacy of Dunces] was resurrected long after the author's death and published by a university press, the reader may well approach it with a certain wariness. It does not look promising…. Fortunately, this is not the case; the book needs no concessions. It is consistently entertaining and irresistibly funny, a comic epic in the great tradition of Cervantes and Fielding with a suspenseful and elaborate plot skillfully managed and the little world of New Orleans encompassing the whole modern world. (p. 7)

One of the finest things about the book is the vividness with which the speech of each character is rendered so as to be at once individual and exactly representative of his class, race, and locality—and, most important of all, both expressive of his nature and funny….

Why this book should have been rejected by publishers fifteen years ago is a mystery. Perhaps...