Who Wrote the Beaver Papers?

The Beaver Papers 2, the sequel to a book Will Jacobs and I wrote over 30 years ago, has just been released by Atomic Drop Press. I’ll be blogging more later about what it’s been like to revisit a fictional realm in our late 50s that we created in our mid-20s, but right now I just want to give a taste of the book.
      The basic idea is, what if famous authors wrote episodes of Leave It to Beaver, that most iconic of all those iconic ‘50s family sitcoms? We’ve forged a whole fictional construct about how this came to be (the cultural leaders of the world rising up to save the show from cancellation in 1963, basically) and what that led to in the lives of the Beaver cast. But the heart of the thing is literary parody.
      Let’s do this with a quiz, because I like quizzes. Here follow the openings of five of the 25 short treatments in the book, which you can match to the list of authors and titles at the bottom. I hope it will give you a few minutes of enjoyment while I ponder the larger life lessons of self-sequelization.
      Oh, and in case you didn’t jump on any of the links above: you can buy the ebook for $2.99 or the paperback for $12.99 straight from the publisher here…or buy either from Amazon here, sending a bit less money to the authors and a bit more to Jeff Bezos (I’m sure if you asked him, he’d say he needs it more). Or, if you’re one of those people who can’t stand to read the sequel until you’ve read the original, you can buy the 30th Anniversary edition of the original Beaver Papers at either Atomic Drop Press or Amazon.
      Okay, then:

1. So the door to this impossibly 100 percent perfect Middle Class house opens and out glides this cool chick in chiffon and pearls, a picnic basket rocking daintily over her arm. She looks over her shoulder and here comes a cat that you can tell right off is as mad as a hatter, wearing this hip golf-sweater-and-slacks ensemble and the…shoes—how they shine! He does the same twist-and-gape and out bounds this teenager in checked shirt and these crazy white chinos that proclaim MOD FREAK as if written in Day-Glo letters, toting a towel and looking extraordinarily like Bucky Barnes, if you remember him from the comics. He looks over his shoulder too, and out flies the coolest, gawkiest, biggest-headed kid you ever saw, diving into that Bauhaus-sleek Plymouth Fury, and then, as it backs right at you, beaming through the back window like a buck-toothed Cheshire Cat on the dread LSD!
 
2. In Mrs. Rayburn’s office sits an anxious Miss Landers Landers. “Beaver Cleaver,” she exclaims. “Beaver of my life, cleaver of my loins. Bee-verrr: lips popping open, buck teeth biting down.” “Pardon me?” asks Mrs. Rayburn. Miss Landers Landers reveals that it all began when she realized that Beaver had a crush on her, just like so many other little boys. But Beaver was unlike any other little boy, he was a magical creature, a rodette. “A what?” asks Mrs. Rayburn. “Like a rodent, but with a sexy French ending,” the teacher says. “I’m brilliant at wordplay.” “Could you just tell the story, please?” asks Mrs. Rayburn.
 
3. When a traveler takes the wrong turn at Camelback Cutoff just beyond Friend’s Lake he comes upon a shunned and curious country. Outsiders seldom visit Mayfield of the monotonous clime and circumscribed lives, and since the horror of 1957 even the road signs pointing toward it have been taken down. It is in Mayfield in a house not remarkable for its olfactory immaculateness that Larry Mondello is born to Mrs. Mondello, of the decayed Mondellos.
 
4. In his blue garden, boys and girls come and go like moths in letterman sweaters and poodle skirts. Crates of RC Cola and Nehi Grape march as freshly as troops of the AEF in a steady procession to his front door, to reemerge in the purpling garage as melancholy, translucent sentinels awaiting their surrender for nickel deposits. Wally ushers Mary Ellen Rogers into this universe of ineffable gaudiness, this vast, vulgar, and meretricious orgy of crepe paper, potato chips, and twist records. Nothing is missing but the great Haskell himself, and in his absence the stories about him grow in romance.
 
5. In the cowboy boots that Aunt Martha sent him for Christmas, Wally Cleaver is nearly five foot ten and life is different. For a year he’s been wrestling with what he thought would be the biggest decision of his life, whether to go to State or Valley, but looking at himself in the mirror he knows that State and Valley combined don’t have room in them for a Wally Cleaver. Lumpy Rutherford has told him that men in the city are just faggots mostly, and so the rich city women have to pay for what they want. Wally is unclear on what a faggot is, but he’s fairly sure he isn’t one, especially in his tall boots, Stetson hat, western shirt, and fringed letterman sweater, and so the city women will pay plenty if he gives them what they want.
 
Now, who wrote what?

A.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Haskell
B.  H. P. Lovecraft, The Mayfield Horror
C.  James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Beaver
D.  Philip K. Dick, Do Beavers Dream of Electric Creeps?
E.  Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Beaver
F.  Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Kleaver Picnic
 
(Note that I gave you six possibilities for five excerpts. Nobody’s going to coast on the process of elimination in this quiz!)