The Twenty-One Balloons

The Twenty-One Balloons is a novel by the American writer and illustrator William Pene du Bois, published by the Viking Press in 1947. It was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1948.

The book opens with the professor's rescue and then tells his story. He had planned a quiet year above the Pacific, but a seagull damaged his balloon and brought him down on Krakatoa, where the inhabitants live on enormous wealth, mine diamonds, and organise their society around a system of invented families and public restaurants. They show him their houses and their machines, and then the volcano begins to stir, which is why leaving the island eventually required more balloons than he had started with. The island and the eruption are drawn from the events of 1883.

Du Bois wrote and illustrated the book himself, and his line drawings accompany the descriptions. The novel is built around an invented community and its machinery rather than around a chase or a fight, and the introduction sets out two ideas of what a journey is for.