Louisiana State University Press, 2001

If Hell indeed awaits the suicide, then you can expect that John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces), Clarence Cason (90° in the Shade), and Wilbur Cash (The Mind of the South) have established a chummy, unairconditioned southern literacy circle there. Each of the three writers contributed single and singular works to the southern canon. All three, southern intellectuals from decent families, taught in colleges where they were long remembered as skillful raconteurs and mild-mannered iconoclasts. All three became canonical sons of the South only after being disinherited. They felt keenly the exactions of what Cash called “the savage ideal,” that special conformity expected among southerners. Strange to say, in the case of Toole and Cash, you can follow their affinities to the bitter end, since both seem to have come unhinged when abroad from mama South. One could argue that Toole’s military stint in Puerto Rico was the kiss of death for his compis mintis, eventually leading to a paranoid belief that “enemies” and conspirators were dogging him. Boys from Brazil notwithstanding, Cash fell under the implausible certainty that he was being pursued by Nazi agents in Mexico City.