Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars

Then there's Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars by Daniel Pinkwater. I could probably have named half-a-dozen other Pinkwater books of that era. They have an admirable mix of absurdity and hidden-world magic in the everyday American high school. It's not a world I believed in, but it's a world that I felt should exist, and one thread of my game design practice is giving people a way to find it.

-- Andrew Plotkin