On this day 40 years ago, a struggling young writer named John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in Biloxi, Mississippi, by attaching a hosepipe to the exhaust of his car and feeding it through the window. A note explained that the 31-year-old was depressed by the serial rejection of his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.

Ironically, he had taken his title from Swift's Thoughts On Various Subjects Moral And Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

It must have seemed that way to Toole. He considered his novel to be a comic masterpiece but, to his dismay, numerous publishers turned it down. Although the reputable Simon & Schuster briefly considered taking the book, they ultimately passed with the editorial excuse that "it isn't really about anything".

The disillusioned author quit his teaching job, hit the bottle and sank into depression. Within a year, he was gone. It was only thanks to the tenacity of his heartbroken mother, Thelma, who spent the next decade tirelessly hawking the manuscript around, that the novel was eventually published in 1980.

Reading the book today, it's hard to understand why anyone ever rejected this wonderfully zany tour-de-farce. Set in 60s New Orleans, Dunces features a voluminous cast of memorably-drawn comic characters, who interact/overreact in the most inventive of ways.

Chief amongst them is the obese, flatulent and obnoxious Ignatius J Reilly -- an over-educated and underachieving idler, who's utterly appalled by the lack of "proper geometry and theology" in the modern world.

Following an expensive automobile accident, Ignatius's long-suffering mother insists that her errant son finds himself gainful employment. The results are funny, unpredictable and disastrous for all concerned.

Dunces' marvellously meandering plot is really just an intertwined series of subplots, but not one word is wasted. The brilliance with which Toole ultimately ties up the myriad storylines demonstrates the talents of a truly formidable comic writer.

Had he hung in there a little longer, he might have lived to see his book get published and ultimately win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Instead he made the fatal mistake of taking the rejections of others to heart.

The screenwriter William Goldman once famously wrote that the golden rule of the film business is to remember that "nobody knows anything". The same is true of most other artistic disciplines. Everybody's heard about the A&R man who failed to sign The Beatles, but the literary world has even more tales of so-called pros failing to recognise major talents.

The list of successful authors who had to endure multiple rejections at the beginning of their careers is long and distinguished. It took 22 attempts before a publisher finally accepted James Joyce's Dubliners in 1914. Robert Pirsig's million-selling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had been rejected 121 times before it was finally published in 1974.

Stephen King's debut Carrie was turned down 30 times, Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune 23 times. The first of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books was rejected by numerous publishers before becoming one of the biggest-selling novels in history. Roddy Doyle's The Commitments garnered so many rejection slips that he eventually decided to publish it himself.

The lesson is to remember always that opinions are like assholes -- everyone has one. Looking at the bestsellers charts these days, which appear to be mostly comprised of lame chick-lit, TV tie-ins and ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies, it seems like there's still a confederacy of dunces calling the shots in the publishing world. Would Toole's novel be published today if he sent the manuscript in unsolicited? Unless he already had a media profile, chances are it wouldn't.

Plus ça change. . .

- Olaf Tyaransen