George W. Peck was a talented writer and editor who built a political career in part by satirizing authority in one of the great best-sellers of the late nineteenth century and a series of accompanying volumes. He is probably better remembered today for his incisive satire than for his prominence as mayor of Milwaukee and governor of Wisconsin, even though he was one of only three Democrats to have been governor from the time Wisconsin achieved statehood in 1848 until his death in 1916. His fame stems chiefly from the humorous accounts of the mischief of a young prankster in the late 1800s who was especially fond of playing tricks on his father and on local church authorities. Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa (1883) became the prototype for a generation of young prankster stories and books that followed in the early twentieth century. It was a best-seller in its time...