The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

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.