"What Goes Up Must Come Down": The Twenty-One Balloons and the Politics of Lighter-Than-Air Fantasy

Reading William Pène du Bois's 1947 fantasy adventure The Twenty-One Balloons alongside related texts by R. M. Ballantyne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jules Verne—works steeped in questions of imperialism and slavery—this article examines the Newbery novel's disingenuous erasure of colonialism. With an empty island ripe for American settlers and high-tech inventions that make work obsolete, the novel reflects the way American children's literature more broadly relies upon the illusion that dispossession, exploitation, and enslavement do not exist. Yet those ills are everywhere beneath the surface of Pène du Bois's happy fantasy: though the novel elides colonialism's implications, it cannot escape them.