I was a mathematics and English major at the University of Kansas: a science-math geek who found that his favorite freshman course was honors English. During the years 1960 to 1962 I took three courses from Shulenberger: English Literature, Literary Criticism, and Creative Writing. He was a huge influence on me that has lasted to this day. An example was the way he thought that T.S. Eliot was ridiculously over-hyped, getting a Nobel Prize with very little work done. That Eliot's best work was MacCavity Cat. Or that the Waste Land was mostly a con job, especially its footnotes, with no merit. Hey, I still agree with all that.

He spoke with authority, with a knowledge of almost everything.

To my great surprise, his main academic research area was on Fenimore Cooper, with his publication: Cooper's Theory of Fiction: His Prefaces and Their Relation to His Novels, University of Kansas Press, 1955. This is a serious scholarly work, very technical. Shulenberger stongly maintains that Cooper was unfairly criticised and even made fun of by Mark Twain and others. This is the same Mark Twain who has tormented generations of studeets with his nearly unreadable Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here's a short excerpt from early in Twain's book: "Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I know what I's gwyne to do: I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin." This was supposed to be "phonetic", but English isn't phonetic at all, so that goal makes no sense. Just try pronoucing "gwyne."

Life is short and so far I've only read parts of Shulenberger's book, and I've read almost nothing by Cooper. It's clear that he found merit in much of Cooper's very extensive writings.

Extensive Obituary of Shulenberger.