We just picked up this first edition of Max Shulman’s Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (New York: Doubleday, 1957).  Shulman (1919-1988) was an American humorist best known for his creation of Dobie Gillis in his 1951 novel, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which spawned a television series in 1953 called “The Affairs of Dobie Gillis.”  Shulman was described by Al Morgan as “the master of undergraduate humor, the outrageous pun, and the verbal caricature.”

From the jacket:  “Rally Round the Flag, Boys takes place in a Connecticut commuting village, where discontented country husbands live with their discontented country wives; where old Yankee settlers wish the commuters would vanish in a puff of smoke but mulct them mercilessly until they do; where teen-aged disciples of the late James Dean prove you don’t have to be underprivileged to be delinquent; where frenzy lies fitfully beneath a rustic patina.  Into this seething cauldron a new and highly volatile ingredient is tossed: the U. S. Army installs a Nike guided missile base, with results that are explosively funny.”