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.
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.