9 novels by Max Shulman
Requirements: Any ePub reader, 5mb
Overview: Maximilian "Max" Shulman (March 14, 1919 – August 28, 1988) was an American writer and humorist best known for his television and short story character Dobie Gillis, as well as for best-selling novels.
Genre: General Fiction/Classics
Anyone Got a Match? – Big tobacco meets the boob tube in this incendiary satire from the bestselling author of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
Jefferson Tatum is a self-made man. Founder of Tatum Cigarette Company, he wrote the brand’s advertising jingle—“Tatums smoke mild like an innocent child”—and has been bringing home big money—and hunting huge bears—ever since. But this year his tobacco sales are down 3 percent thanks to the surgeon general’s cancer warnings. To make matters worse, Tatum’s forty-three-year-old son, Virgil, shows more interest in presiding over his unaccredited college and its undefeated football team than learning about the family business.
Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, Tatum sets out to reinvigorate his company by transforming Acanthus College into a top-tier research institution. The school’s scientists will prove that food is more dangerous than cigarettes, making everyone so anxious they’ll start smoking again. But when Tatum hires a New York theater director turned Hollywood bigwig to produce a documentary about the research, nothing goes as planned. Secrets are unearthed, old loves are rekindled, and a TV director with a conscience (will wonders never cease?) threatens to expose the whole scam.
Barefoot Boy with Cheek – A wild and witty satire of American college life from the author of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
On his first day of college, farm boy Asa Hearthrug enthusiastically jumps out of bed—and discovers that his pajama pants are caught in the bedsprings. He learns that his dog has died, and his father, in an effort to soften the blow, tells an absurd story about a female bullfighter. Next, the freshman pays a visit to his high school sweetheart to say a heartfelt goodbye, but Lodestone La Toole is more interested in hamburgers than vows of devotion. And when Asa finally arrives at the University of Minnesota—wham!—he gets run over by a frat boy’s convertible.
Max Shulman’s bestselling debut novel, written when he was almost as fresh-faced as his protagonist, delightfully skewers every sacred cow of collegiate life. From the faculty expert on “Merrie Olde England” who once spent two weeks on that distant land to the sidewalk booby-trap used by the Alpha Cholera fraternity to round-up reluctant pledges, Barefoot Boy with Cheek bursts at the seams with outrageous characters, delirious set pieces, and gut-busting one-liners
I Was a Teenage Dwarf – This hysterical follow-up to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis details the lifelong pursuits of the pint-sized Don Juan
Each chapter—straight from the diaries of Dobie Gillis—is a true experience from our hero’s life between the ages of thirteen to thirty. All the experiences are about girls, because that’s what Dobie’s life is about: girls.
In “Girls: Their Cause and Cure,” Dobie is a sixth-grader with the serious issue of being shorter than every girl in his class. A petite cellist with leaky tear ducts is his best bet until a beautiful rock-and-roll chick arrives at school. Dobie falls hard for the new girl, not realizing that she’s due for a growth spurt.
Two years later, Dobie has more important concerns. In “Puberty Is Here to Stay,” his girlfriend, Tuckie Webb, goes away to summer camp and comes back more stunning than ever. Too bad she has hulking seventeen-year-old Murder McIntyre attached to her arm.
Fifteen years later, Dobie weds his college sweetheart, Chloe. Marriage, it turns out, is the cure for Dobie’s obsession with girls, but money worries now plague our hero’s mind. When baby Pete arrives and Chloe spends all their cash on vitamins, nursery school, fencing lessons, and fancy dogs, Dobie fears he’ll never have the nest egg he desires. Then he realizes that he already has the two things a man really needs: a beautiful, loving wife and a happy child.
Potatoes Are Cheaper: A Novel – A Jewish freshman searches for love and money at the University of Minnesota in this raucous satire from the author of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
It’s the middle of the Great Depression and Morris Katz and his cousin Albert are broke. The self-declared “best humpers in St. Paul,” they haven’t quite figured out how to make their talents pay. But that’s all about to change when they head off to college on a mission from Morris’s mother to find rich, unattractive Jewish girls to marry.
The boys arrive on campus armed with a secret weapon: the poetry of Morris’s cousin Crip, a stay-at-home genius who sublimates his sex drive into song. Within a day, Morris is courting Celeste Zimmerman, the frumpy heir to a movie theater franchise. But then an Irish Catholic beauty falls under the spell of Crip’s verse and goes gaga over Morris. She thinks he’s a Jewish-Communist revolutionary poet, and who is he to tell her otherwise? But is it happiness Morris truly wants, or money? And what will Mama Katz say?
Sleep Till Noon – A rags-to-riches tale so outrageously hysterical it could have only come from the marvelous mind of Max Shulman, bestselling author of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
A sensitive boy growing up in a bad neighborhood, Harry Riddle doesn’t fit in with the kids who hold up gas stations, steal purses, and drop safes on policemen. He prefers to contemplate the American dream and his father’s advice for achieving it: “Get rich, boy. Then sleep till noon and screw ’em all.” But when Harry gets his first job as a cafeteria busboy, a customer warns him that money leads to corruption. The idea disturbs him so much that he accidently sticks his hand into a meat grinder.
Luckily, attorney Walter Obispo witnesses Harry’s mishap and manages to win him a hefty court settlement—which becomes a lot less hefty when Obispo takes his eighty percent cut. Impressed, Harry decides to make his fortune in law. But the shortcuts he takes to pass the bar and start his own practice do him no good when he loses case after case after case. Not to worry, however, because our hero soon learns the oldest trick in book: Marry rich. With an heiress as a bride, Harry can’t lose—anything except his friends, his integrity, and his sanity, that is.
Rally Round the Flag, Boys! – The US Army invades a small Connecticut town in this Cold War farce from bestselling humorist Max Shulman Harry Bannerman drinks his nightly bourbon on the train from New York City to Putnam’s Landing, Connecticut. A typical commuter, he has a bald spot, a house, two mortgages, three children, and a wife who is a committed soccer mom and pillar of the community. Harry just wants to curl up on the couch with Grace when he gets home, but instead faces an endless round of PTA meetings, political rallies, little league games, and amateur theatricals. Second Lt. Guido di Maggio loves baseball less than his last name implies and his fiancée, Maggie Larkin, more than the army allows. College sweethearts, the couple has their future all mapped out: Guido will complete his military service in Maryland while Maggie starts her teaching career in Putnam’s Landing, a five-hour train ride away. But when Guido is reassigned to Alaska and Maggie loses her job for giving a sex talk to second graders, their plans go up in smoke. To avoid Alaska and save his relationship with Maggie, Guido takes the thankless job directing public relations at a new anti-aircraft base in Putnam’s Landing. What happens next in this national bestseller is a dark and funny story of the disaffected and disconnected in Cold War suburbia as tensions mount between the “invading” army (“invading” Connecticut, that is) and a bevy of local teenagers; between frustrated commuters and their frustrated wives; between social do-gooders and Yankee conservatives; and between romantic dreams of the artist’s life in New York and the pedestrian reality of having to earn a living to house and feed a growing family.
The Feather Merchants – The raucous and randy adventures of a stateside soldier during World War II
Sergeant Dan Miller wanted to be a flying ace, but the air force grounded him for poor vision. To make matters worse, when the myopic Miller travels home to Minneapolis on furlough, he finds the local “feather merchants”—aka civilians—breaking all the wartime rules. They’re guzzling black-market gas, hoarding rationed food, and listening to suspiciously expensive radios. But the most troubling news of all arrives when Sergeant Dan’s main squeeze, the voluptuous Estherlee McCracken, declares that she wants nothing to do with a pencil-pushing GI.
The night after he gets dumped, Sergeant Dan seeks solace in watered-down whiskeys and a chorus line of ladies dancing in red, white, and blue G-strings. A friend introduces the sad-sack noncom as Robert Jordan, dynamiter of bridges, and before Sergeant Dan can stop that bell from tolling, he’s the most celebrated man in town. What follows is a hysterical comedy of errors as our hero tries to outrun his patriotic admirers, win back Estherlee’s love, and avoid a court martial.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis – This riotous chronicle of the ins and outs and ups and downs of collegiate romance was the basis for the iconic television show starring Dwayne Hickman, Bob Denver, and Tuesday Weld
Including stories first published in Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post, this bestselling collection follows the romantic escapades of Max Shulman’s famed collegiate Don Juan. Like most undergraduates, Dobie Gillis is a bit scattered—sometimes he’s as quick as a whip, other times dull as a doorstop, and his major keeps changing from chemistry to law to journalism. But no matter what subject he should be studying, Dobie always has a girl on his mind.
In “Love Is a Fallacy,” Shulman’s best-known short story that to this day is taught in writing classes and English survey courses as an archetypal example of the genre, Dobie finds the perfect bride-to-be. She’s beautiful and gracious, but not too smart—a flaw that he sets out to fix, with the most hilarious and ironic of consequences. In “The Unlucky Winner,” Dobie and Clothilde Ellingboe cut corners in class to make more time for their dates. But after an impossible English assignment sends the couple deep into the stacks to plagiarize an obscure essay, Dobie finds himself in a ridiculous bind. And in “She Shall Have Music,” Dobie can’t focus on his duties as circulation manager for the college humor magazine because his girlfriend, Pansy, has been shipped off to New York by her purple-faced father. The desperate Romeo hatches a plan to save the magazine and visit his girl, but a series of bad decisions and a Lithuanian wedding band threaten to ruin everything.
The Zebra Derby – Home from the war, a veteran finds that his battles have only just begun in this zany and irreverent satire from the author of Rally Round the Flag, Boys!
Last seen gallivanting on a college campus in Barefoot Boy with Cheek, Asa Hearthrug traded in his varsity jacket for khaki and fought his way across the Pacific. Now he’s back in his hometown of Whistlestop, Minnesota, eager to share his war stories, but no one wants to listen—they’ve already seen the movies.
Postwar America is a brave new plastic world, and Asa’s girlfriend dreams of settling down in a house made entirely of the synthetic material. To help make Lodestone La Toole’s fantasy a reality, Asa seeks his fortune in vitamin-infused cookie cutters, junkyard fan lamps, airplane fishing trips, and mobile culture emporiums. A failed capitalist, he flirts with communism but decides to rededicate himself to college instead. If only his professors didn’t expect every veteran to be a window-busting, wall-chewing, bloodthirsty maniac, he might actually get some studying done.
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