Max Shulman (March 14, 1919 – August 28, 1988) was an American writer who was popular in the third quarter of the 20th century. His writing often focused on young people, particularly in a collegiate setting.

Shulman was the author of several fairly well-received novels, including Rally Round the Flag, Boys! and Sleep Till Noon. He was also a co-writer, with Robert Paul Smith, of the long-running Broadway play, The Tender Trap, starring Robert Preston, which was later made into a successful movie. However, he is probably best remembered for his creation of the character "Dobie Gillis", who was the subject of a series of short stories compiled under the title, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which became the basis for a CBS television series of the same name, and had previously been the subject of a film, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953). Shulman was also the writer of the series' theme song. The same year that the series began, 1959, a novel continuing the adventures of Dobie and his friends, I Was a Teenage Dwarf, was published. (Its title was a takeoff on what is now seen as a "schlock horror" classic, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, starring Michael Landon.)

Shulman was also a screenwriter. He was one of the collaborators on a television documentary, Light's Diamond Jubliee, which was supposedly a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the invention of the light bulb by Thomas A. Edison, but which was in reality little more than a public relations piece for the electric industry, as its predecessor film, Light's Golden Jubilee, had been 25 years before.

After his success with the Gillis character, Shulman continued to write. His humor column, "On Campus," was syndicated in over 350 collegiate newspapers at one point. A later novel, Anyone Got a Match?, satirized both the television and tobacco industries, as well as the South and college football. His last major successful project was his work on House Calls, which began as a 1978 movie based on one of his stories which starred Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, and later became a television series (1979-1981) starring Wayne Rogers and Lynn Redgrave in the same roles, for which he was the lead writer.

External link

[1] (http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0795738/) Shulman's IMDb entry