Shulman, Max (1919–1988)

Born and raised in St. Paul, educated there and at the University of Minnesota, Max Shulman published seven successful novels and two collections of short stories, wrote or co-wrote three Broadway plays and five Hollywood movies, and produced two popular TV series, most famously The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

Shulman was born on the old Jewish West Side of St. Paul, the son of Abraham and Bessie (Karchmar) Shulman, recent immigrants from Belarus. His childhood was not comfortable; his father, a house painter, rarely worked during the 1930s, and Shulman wrote later that his mother blamed his father for the Depression. He grew up at 701 Selby in the then heavily Jewish Selby–Dale neighborhood, attended public schools, and graduated twenty-sixth in his class of 665 from St. Paul’s Central High School in 1936.

He went on to the University of Minnesota, where he majored in journalism (he graduated in 1942); wrote a humor column, “Sauce for the Gander,” for the Minnesota Daily; and wrote for, then edited, the university’s monthly humor magazine, Ski-U-Mah. An editor from the Doubleday publishing company happened upon his work and urged him to try a novel. Thus at age twenty-four Shulman brought forth a best-seller, Barefoot Boy With Cheek, a collection of funny names and gags, its thin plot and frantic action set at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The hero is Asa Hearthrug from Whistlestop, Minnesota; he pursues two women—campus radical Yetta Samovar and beautiful sorority sister Noblesse Oblige. His football-star fraternity brother is Eino Fflliikkiinnenn.

From the University of Minnesota Shulman went into the army, where he produced two more comic novels: The Feather Merchants (1944) and The Zebra Derby (1946). A Time magazine reviewer called Shulman’s writing “an aimless gaggle of giggles,” but the novels sold well. He moved to New York, where Barefoot Boy became a Broadway musical starring Red Buttons and Nancy Walker.

In the 1950s Shulman produced two more novels, Sleep Till Noon (1950) and Rally Round The Flag, Boys (1958), and another Broadway play—The Tender Trap, starring Robert Preston and Kim Hunter. He also wrote movies: Confidentially Connie, with Van Johnson and Janet Leigh; Half a Hero, with Red Skelton; and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, with Debbie Reynolds, Bobby Van, and Bob Fosse. Rally Round The Flag became a movie also, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (though Shulman did not write the screenplay), as did The Tender Trap, with Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds. Another play, How Now, Dow Jones, had a short Broadway run in 1967, and another novel, Anyone Got a Match?, came out in 1964. Shulman eventually moved to southern California and into television.

Shulman’s first short story collection, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, appeared in 1951. Though the TV series based on the stories appears to be set in California, all of the original Dobie Gillis stories take place at the University of Minnesota. Dobie is usually from St. Paul, but sometimes from Blue Earth or Koochiching County. Shulman produced the TV series and wrote about a quarter of the episodes. Later, Shulman wrote the movie House Calls (1978), starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. It too became a TV series.

Though Shulman grew up in a Jewish household and neighborhood, nothing Jewish appeared in his work until his last novel, Potatoes Are Cheaper (1971). There the hero, Morris Katz, is a kind of Jewish Dobie Gillis, who lives at 701 Selby Avenue in St. Paul with a fictional family identical to Shulman’s real one. Morris, girl-crazy like Dobie, pursues a Jewish girl, homely but rich, and a Catholic girl, pretty but poor. Shulman later said that Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint freed him to bring Jewishness into his writing. Many critics consider Potatoes Are Cheaper his best novel.

In 2020, Shulman's books are out of print on paper, but available as e-books. The movies—except possibly House Calls—have also fallen out of popularity. We do not know how many books Shulman sold, but it seems likely that, among writers born and raised in St. Paul, only F. Scott Fitzgerald has sold more. Fitzgerald sold more books; Shulman produced more laughs.