Barefoot Boy With Cheek

This is a satirical look at college life in the early 1940s, written in 1943 by Max Shulman, a popular humorist from that era. The story’s narrator and protagonist is Asa Hearthrug, an appealingly naïve country bumpkin who is off to his freshman year at the University of Minnesota, which Shulman – in one of the book’s funniest passages – identifies as a “wholly imaginary” institution in the book’s foreword. From there the book progresses as a kind of comedy of errors, all of which serve to introduce characters with improbable names that were undoubtedly funny and/or subversive at the time , and situations that almost certainly reflected the cultural mileposts of the era.