SLEEP TILL NOON (191 pp.) Max ShulmanDoubleday ($2).
When Max Shulman was editor of Ski-U-Mah, then the humor magazine of the University of Minnesota, he was one of a group of aspiring authors who showed their pieces to Novelist Sinclair Lewis, and asked the great man's advice. Lewis' advice: first go to work in a grocery store. Max had already worked in a grocery store; he sat down and wrote a book.
Barefoot Boy with Cheek was a remarkably sustained example of the kind of homely slapstick that gets a big laugh in the freshman dormitories. It sold 33.000 copies (and 220,000...