# Robert Kaplow

Robert Kaplow (born c. 1954) is an American novelist and teacher whose coming-of-age novel was made into the film Me and Orson Welles. The story is about "youthful creative ambition" and has received positive reviews from The New York Times which described it as "nimble, likable and smart." Kaplow has written nine books and used to teach English language and film studies at Summit High School in New Jersey.

## Early years

Kaplow graduated in 1972 from Westfield High School in Westfield, where he wrote his first satirical sketches as a student.
One of Kaplow's later novels is sprinkled with references to Westfield. "Westfield remains for me the geography of my youth. I'm still very drawn to the place, though I don't live there," Kaplow said in 2009.
He graduated from Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey.

## Me and Orson Welles

Kaplow conceived the idea for the book while being a student at Rutgers University. He saw a photo in the periodical Theatre Arts Monthly from 1937 with Orson Welles with a young man. Kaplow wondered what the young man might have been thinking. He wrote the story, but it took about nine years to find a publisher. It was made into a film by director Richard Linklater which was released in 2009. The Guardian critic Sophie Martelli described the film as a "schmaltzy yet charming coming-of-age story." Me and Orson Welles was a New York Times bestseller and the film in 2008 starred Zac Efron and Claire Danes. The movie was filmed in the Gaiety Theatre on the Isle of Man. Kaplow's most recent novel is a satire of writers, critics, and publishers. For National Public Radio's Morning Edition, Mr. Kaplow created "Moe Moskowitz and the Punsters," a series of musical and satirical pop-culture parodies. These musical parodies were released on two CDs: Steven Spielberg, Give Me Some of Your Money and Cancel My Subscription: The Worst of NPR.
He has been a resident of Metuchen, New Jersey.

## The Watcher

The 2022 Netflix show The Watcher, based on a real-life incident that occurred in Kaplow's hometown of Westfield, features a character loosely based on Kaplow named Roger Kaplan, portrayed by Michael Nouri, who is presented as a suspect of being the author of the mysterious letters.
Kaplow became associated with the case after he admitted to having written admiring letters to a Victorian house on the north side of Westfield, around the time "The Watcher" was sending letters obsessed with another house in the same town. Kaplow's students recalled, "He had this idea to start writing letters to the house – not the occupants but to the house." He eventually befriended the family who lived there; they even let him housesit once.
No actual connection between Kaplow and the real-life "The Watcher" has been proven.

## Books published

* Alex Icicle: A Romance in Ten Torrid Chapters, the comic rant of an over-educated and under-loved eighth-grader obsessively in love with a girl who doesn't know he's alive, and
* Alessandra in Love, a comic tale about the romantic tribulations of a sardonic and intelligent high school junior, and
* The Cat Who Killed Lillian Jackson Braun: A Parody, satirizing the books of Lilian Jackson Braun and the mystery genre, and
* Me and Orson Welles: A Novel (2003), a romantic coming-of-age story set in 1937 around the founding of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, and
* Who's Killing the Great Writers of America? (2007), a satirical murder mystery. After Sue Grafton, Danielle Steel, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tom Clancy all are murdered, Stephen King hunts for their killer, and
* Playland: A Slightly Subversive Love Story (2022), the tale of a teenage couple attempting to navigate a life together in New York in the summer of 1972, and
* The Lifers (2022), a novel about teachers.