The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Stories

Max Shulman

Jan 2016 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Riotous tales of the college playboy-next-door—the basis for the iconic television show. “Shulman’s creation was born a sitcom hero” (The A.V. Club).

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.

About the author

Max Shulman (1919–1988) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer best known as the author of Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (1957), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1951), and the popular television series of the same name. The son of Russian immigrants, Shulman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota, where he wrote a celebrated column for the campus newspaper and edited the humor magazine. His bestselling debut novel, Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943), was followed by two books written while he served in the Army during World War II: The Feather Merchants (1944) and The Zebra Derby (1946). The Tender Trap (1954), a Broadway play cowritten with Robert Paul Smith, was adapted into a movie starring Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds. His acclaimed novel Rally Round the Flag, Boys! became a film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Shulman’s other books include Sleep till Noon (1950), a hilarious reinvention of the rags-to-riches tale; I Was a Teenage Dwarf (1959), which chronicles the further adventures of Dobie Gillis; Anyone Got a Match? (1964), a prescient satire of the tobacco, television, and food industries; and Potatoes Are Cheaper (1971), the tale of a romantic Jewish college student in depression-era St. Paul. His movies include The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (with Debbie Reynolds and Bob Fosse) and House Calls (with Walter Mathau and Glenda Jackson). One of America’s premier humorists, he greatly influenced the comedy of Woody Allen and Bob Newhart, among many others.