Bright, creative, talented in music and art, John skipped two grammar school grades and later attended Tulane University and Columbia graduate school on scholarships. During two years in the army in Puerto Rico, he completed A Confederacy of Dunces, a boisterous, picaresque novel about his New Orleans, a uniquely diverse city more Mediterranean than American, more Latin than Southern. In 1963 he submitted the work to Simon and Schuster, where it came to the attention of editor Robert Gottlieb. For two years, encouraged by Gottlieb, John made revisions, gradually growing more and more depressed, until he finally abandoned hope.

Meantime he was teaching at a New Orleans college, pursuing a Ph.D. in English, and living at home, where his salary relieved strained financial circumstances. His father was incapacitated by deafness, and the private elocution lessons with which Thelma had for years supplemented their income were no longer fashionable. Always rather reserved, even secretive, despite his marked skill at mimicry and his wry comments on people and events around him, John revealed little of his personal life to anyone. Only a few friends even knew that he was a writer, much less that he had submitted a novel to a publisher. During the 1968 fall semester, colleagues noticed a growing paranoia, and in January 1969 John disappeared from the college and his home. His family heard no more of him until that fateful March day when policemen came to tell them their son was dead by his own hand. He had left a note addressed "To my parents," which his mother read and then destroyed.

For Thelma the weeks of agonizing over John's whereabouts now stretched into years of unrelenting maternal sorrow over his suicide. She felt abandoned, even betrayed, the son to whom she had devoted the past three decades dead, her husband isolated in his deafness. Life seemed to stand still, mired in a swamp of despair, until one day she came across the typescript of A Confederacy of Dunces and found a new purpose.