author
Max McConn
b. 1881
Best remembered today for a witty early-20th-century novel, this American writer also spent many years shaping college life as an administrator. His work moves easily between campus satire, practical advice for students, and light fiction with a comic touch.
1 Audiobook
Mollie's Substitute Husband
by Max McConn
About the author
Writing as Max McConn, Charles Maxwell McConn was born on July 22, 1881, and is also recorded in reference sources under both forms of his name. He wrote Mollie's Substitute Husband, a comic novel first published in 1920 and now widely available in public-domain editions.
McConn was not only a novelist. Contemporary university sources describe him as an academic administrator who served as assistant to the president of the University of Illinois, became dean at Lehigh University in 1923, and later served as dean of Washington Square College at New York University from 1938 to 1947.
His books show both sides of that career. Alongside fiction, he published campus-centered and education-focused works such as College or Kindergarten?, Studies Are Not Every Thing: The Diary of a Freshman, and Planning for College. Taken together, they suggest a writer who knew student life from the inside and liked to treat it with humor rather than solemnity.