John D. Fitzgerald

John D. Fitzgerald's Great Brain stories about Tom, his brilliant and conniving older brother, are a series of charmingly offbeat tall tales. According to Fitzgerald, Tom was the youngest con man in Utah--a boy capable of cheating his peers out of their allowances and then unblushingly explaining to their parents that he had done so in an effort to teach them about the dangers of gambling. Fitzgerald's books, with their Tom Sawyer-esque charm, are the kind of low-key American classics that you can't always find on bookstore shelves but are faithfully reprinted every few years, giving a new generation of children a chance to experience them.

Aftertaste:
For a major author, Fitzgerald never made much of a splash in his native Utah. (Perhaps because he wasn't Mormon...?) This seems quite unfair.

Availability:
Everwhere.

Other Recommendations:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

Cheaper By the Dozen, by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey