The Twenty-One Balloons
by William Pène du Bois
Summary
Professor William Waterman Sherman, a retired arithmetic teacher who has decided he never wants to see another schoolchild, sets off from San Francisco in a homemade hot air balloon meant to carry him quietly across the Pacific Ocean for a year of solitude. A gull punctures the balloon almost immediately, and Sherman crash lands instead on the island of Krakatoa, where he discovers twenty families secretly living atop one of the richest diamond mines in the world, each running an elaborate themed restaurant, American, French, Dutch, Chinese and more, and rotating hosting duties on a twenty day calendar of their own invention. Their houses are full of playful mechanical inventions, mobile furniture, hidden staircases, and Sherman is drawn into their odd, wealthy, self contained society just as it is about to end: the island's real 1883 volcanic eruption arrives, and the families and Sherman escape together on a platform lifted by twenty balloons tied in a ring, drifting west over the ocean. One by one the balloons and their passengers parachute down over India and Belgium as the platform loses lift, until Sherman alone descends into the Atlantic, where a passing ship rescues him still clutching a fortune in diamonds. The book closes with Sherman, home again, already sketching plans for an even more improbable balloon.
It is fast, funny and openly tall tale in spirit, closer to invention piled on invention than to realistic adventure, and it reads quickly even for a reluctant reader thanks to du Bois's own detailed, playful illustrations of every impossible device.
Historical Context & Significance
The Twenty-One Balloons won the 1948 Newbery Medal for a book Viking published in 1947, written and illustrated by du Bois himself. That year's honor books were Claire Huchet Bishop's Pancakes Paris, Carolyn Treffinger's Li Lun, Lad of Courage, Catherine Besterman's The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot, Harold Courlander's The Cow Tail Switch, and Other West African Stories, and Marguerite Henry's Misty of Chincoteague.
Du Bois acknowledged before publication that the premise resembled F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 novella The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a debt he did not hide. Du Bois, who had lived in France from age eight to fourteen and sold his first book at nineteen, went on to become a founding editor of The Paris Review, serving as its art editor from 1953, and the book has stayed in print ever since, still read for its inventions as much as its plot.