Robert Kaplow (born c. 1954) is an American novelist and teacher^[1] whose coming-of-age novel was made into a film titled Me and Orson Welles.^[2] 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."^[2] Kaplow has written nine books and used to teach English language and film studies at Summit High School in New Jersey.^[3]

Kaplow graduated in 1972 from Westfield High School in Westfield, where he wrote his first satirical sketches as a student.^[4][5]

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.^[6]

He graduated from Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey.

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.^[7] Kaplow wondered what the young man might have been thinking. He wrote the story, but it took about nine years to find a publisher.^[7] It was made into a film by director Richard Linklater which was released in 2009.^[2] The Guardian critic Sophie Martelli described the film as a "schmaltzy yet charming coming-of-age story."^[8] Me and Orson Welles was a New York Times bestseller^{[citation needed]} 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.^[9] 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.^[3]

Kaplow admitted that he had written admiring letters to a Victorian house on the north side of Westfield. His 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.^[10]

• 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.