
Canadian author Joseph Boyden has recently
released a new book called Through Black Spruce. It is Boyden’s second novel and was awarded the Giller Prize last fall. Joseph Boyden is married to another author: Amanda Boyden.
A different vision of New Orleans is portrayed in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Written in the 1960s, this has long been the standard for New Orleans novels - the city here is quirky and hot, there is danger and poverty but it is presented through the lens of humour. Kennedy Toole died in 1969, the book was published in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.
A Confederacy of Dunces is not the only book to win the Pulitzer Prize posthumously: James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer in 1958: Agee died in 1955. Prior to writing A Death in the Familiy, Agee was involved in a famous historical project with American photographer Walker Evans.
Agee and Evans spent a summer in 1936 on three farms in Alabama. Together they produced a book of photographs and text called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that was celebrated for revealing to mainstream America the dire living conditions of poor Americans at the end of the Great Depression.
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