<DIV>John Kennedy Toole?who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece <I>A Confederacy of Dunces</I>?wrote<I>The Neon Bible</I> for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.<BR></DIV>