Johnny Moore lives in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century. He is there to witness the Wright brothers make history by becoming the first people to fly. But Johnny's life changes years before the dramatic first flight, when his mama gives him a blank book and tells him to write in it. At first, Johnny doesn't think he has anything interesting to write about in his journal. When he does put his pencil to the paper, his spelling and grammar are terrible. But pretty soon some "dingbatters" from Ohio, called the Wright brothers, breeze into town and Johnny starts to have more of a story to tell. Before he knows it, he is writing every day, telling about helping the Wrights build their flying machine. Over the course of three years, he forms a friendship with the odd brothers from Ohio, improves his writing and grammar quite a bit, and if he waits long enough, he might even get to fly!
Author
The author of over 80 books in a little over a decade of writing, Dan Gutman has written on topics from computers to baseball. Beginning his freelance career as a nonfiction author dealing mostly with sports for adults and young readers, Gutman has concentrated on juvenile fiction since 1995. His most popular titles include the time-travel sports book Honus and Me and its sequels, and a clutch of baseball books, including The Green Monster from Left Field. From hopeful and very youthful presidential candidates to stunt men, nothing is off limits in Gutman's fertile imagination. As he noted on his author Web site, since writing his first novel, They Came from Centerfield, in 1994, he has been hooked on fiction. "It was fun to write, kids loved it, and I discovered how incredibly rewarding it is to take a blank page and turn it into a WORLD." Gutman was born in New York City in 1955, but moved to Newark, New Jersey the following year and spent his youth there.
