Max Schott (1935–2026): teacher, editor and fiction writer

Max Schott (1935–2026) taught literature and writing at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies for more than 30 years. He also wrote fiction, edited a biweekly column for the Independent and became a public figure even though he never called attention to himself.

His restraint did not make him invisible. A Santa Barbara local asked me across State Street, “Who’s that guy — is he a writer?” The explanation was equally compressed: “Because every time I see him, he’s writing — or even reading a book!”

What did Schott teach beyond literature?

As an undergraduate, I studied with Schott at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, where he introduced me and hundreds of other students to Chaucer and Sophocles. After I graduated, he let me attend his Narrative Prose course, then encouraged my fiction. For about 40 years, he read everything I wrote and gave me straight assessments and precisely directed advice.

In my early twenties, I became his friend. Schott and his wife, Elaine, hosted casual but elaborately prepared dinners, cooked solely by Elaine, at their home at 1802 Olive Avenue. They also invited us to restaurants, with the Rose Café on the Mesa their favorite for a couple of decades.

Their house was my favorite venue. It felt more like home than anywhere except home. Max and Elaine saw me stumble through graduate school, romances and break-ups, and later acted practically as foster godparents to my marriage.

One of my duties, and pleasures, at the Independent was editing Schott’s biweekly (appearing every two weeks) column, A Writer’s Notebook, in 1991–92. The work placed me close to a writer whose public manner concealed both his discipline and his generosity.

How did Schott work?

Schott wrote in downtown coffee shops, at UCSB and in the downtown library. He read widely in fiction and biography, offering careful, candid and brilliant assessments of authors and books without argument. His own pages changed repeatedly: he crossed out page after page, aiming not at fine writing, though his work always met that standard, but at seeing more deeply and clearly into the images and moments his imagination supplied.

He sometimes discarded passages that looked precious to me, and I read his work almost as frequently as he read mine. While selecting stories, essays and diaries for Keeping Warm (2004), Schott told me he was throwing out almost all his rejected manuscripts. I objected. To my relief, he saved me some.

My wife and I moved to New York City, but visited Max and Elaine nearly every year. We spent parts of two of my sabbaticals at UCSB, mainly because they still lived in Santa Barbara. We also named our first child after Max.

How did memory become fiction?

About a dozen years ago, Schott received a Parkinson’s diagnosis. His daughter Anna believes it may have been a misdiagnosis for Lewy Body Dementia. Whatever the precise diagnosis, he continued reading insatiably.

During the pandemic, I wrote to Schott nearly every day. For two years afterward, we spoke once or twice a week by phone while I composed his biography. In 1996, he named me his literary executor—the person designated to carry out his literary affairs.

That biography drew me into his unpublished manuscripts. One was a handwritten novel, Ralph, about Ralph Camarillo, the cowboy who taught the adolescent Max to train horses and compete professionally in rodeos.

Schott wrote it after his diagnosis. Ralph concerns his struggle to remember and, through visions of memory, to create fiction. It seems to me an extraordinary work, and the Independent published excerpts last year.

For years, if I was downtown between 10 and 3 on a non-teaching day, I might walk the few blocks from Victoria Court to Carrillo, glance into coffee shops or enter the library, and perhaps see him. Such an encounter usually became an invitation to sit and talk.

I told him things I told almost no one else. He listened intently and, if I was lucky, laughed. He also let his many friends lean on him, which was one of his most generous traits.

I do not know what we gave him in return. I know we adored this generous, kindly and modest man, who also just happened to be a marvelous writer.

What does Ralph change for readers?

For readers, Ralph changes how we should read Schott’s late work. Memory is not a stable record there; it is a problem the writer must solve through invention. That distinction matters because the biography rests on two years of conversation and near-daily correspondence during the pandemic, while the manuscript shows the process in Schott’s own writing.

As the biography takes shape, Ralph will test the larger claim in his work: memory becomes literature only when invention reshapes it.