Toole, describing the novel during correspondence with an editor, wrote "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." It failed to attract interest from publishers and was not released until after Toole's death, after "Confederacy"'s great success.