Like A Confederacy of Dunces, the novel had a long and difficult road to publication. The Neon Bible was written in 1954, but after initial attempts at securing a publisher proved fruitless, the novel was put aside and Toole eventually began work on Confederacy. Toole, describing the novel during correspondence with an editor he was pitching Confederacy to, wrote of it "In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc. The book, of course, was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway."[1] Toole committed suicide in 1969, leaving the unpublished manuscripts of A Confederacy of Dunces and The Neon Bible in the possession of Thelma Toole, his mother.
Louisiana's Napoleonic code-influenced inheritance law meant that these works technically belonged not only to Thelma Toole, but also to several other relatives on his father's side of the family. However, as the initial print run of Confederacy was only 2,500 copies (and was distributed by the small and non-mainstream Louisiana State University Press) no one figured that owning rights to the book would be especially profitable. Accordingly, Thelma Toole was able to convince these relatives to give up their rights to A Confederacy of Dunces.
When Confederacy became a Pulitzer Prize winner and a commercial success in 1981, the situation changed. Toole's relatives knew that if issued as a follow-up novel, The Neon Bible could bring in a substantial amount of money. Consequently, they refused to give up their shared rights to this novel. Meanwhile, Thelma Toole refused to have the novel published if it meant that large portions of the income it derived would go to these relatives.
Thelma Toole died in 1984, but instructed author W. Kenneth Holditch to act on her behalf and keep the book from being published even after her death. Although Holditch attempted to respect Thelma's wishes (even though he did not agree with them), the relatives eventually filed a formal lawsuit that would have put the book up for auction. Holditch knew that no matter how it was auctioned off, the outcome of the legal action would be that the book would be legally published. He therefore allowed The Neon Bible to see publication in 1989, before the "spectacle" of an auction could be held.[2]
