William Pène du Bois

William Pène du Bois, (1916-1993), author and illustrator

Born William Pène Sherman du Bois on May 9, 1916, in Nutley, New Jersey, United States.

He was an author and illustrator of children's books, best known for The Twenty-One Balloons, published in 1948. From 1953 to 1960 he worked with George Plimpton as the Art Editor for The Paris Review.

He died on February 5, 1993 in Nice, France.

Writing

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

William Pène du Bois won the Newbury Medal in 1948 for The Twenty-One Balloons, and Caldecott Honors in 1952 for Bear Party and 1957 for Lion.

Some of his books (Bear Party , Lion) are picture books with a minimum of text, and properly classified as children's books.

Others, however, such as The Three Policemen, The Great Geppy, The Twenty-one Balloons, Squirrel Hotel, Peter Graves, The Giant, appeal to all ages. These books exhibit whimsical ingenuity in story and illustrations.

Though not usually so classified, these books seem to qualify as science fiction. Their interest lies more in their imaginative elaboration of ideas than in their characters. These ideas are exhibited in great detail. Some are fantastic, but many are plausible, and some (such as the Balloon Merry-Go-Round in The Twenty-one Balloons) might well be feasible.

A passage from The Twenty-one Balloons may serve to illustrate his style and method. In the story, the Explorers' Club of San Francisco is capped with its hemispherical cupola, painted as a globe of the Northern Hemisphere. The club decorates the cupola with balloons, in honor of a distinguished visitor. Du Bois writes:

The ten miniature balloons around the base of the cupola had a combined lifting pull of six hundred pounds. The larger balloon attached to the top had a lifting pull of three hundred pounds. This made a total strain of nine hundred pounds. The cupola weighed a little over four hundred. Nothing unusual happened at first, but during the night, as the winds gently tossed the balloons back and forth, the cupola started to loosen somewhat like a loose tooth does.... At one-twenty-nine in the morning, it gently rose from its perch on the Explorers' Club and, dropping bits of plaster, spikes, and rivets, flew off eastward over the city.... It started losing altitude only after having had a nice flight of four and a half hours, and landed silently and gracefully in a peaceful little Indian Reservation which was situated in a snug valley between two huge mountains....

Now what do you suppose the Indians did?

Did they back away trembling with fear?

No.

Did they shriek with fright?

No.

Did they beat up the Medicine Man?

No. They gave the cupola and appraising look, then one of them said, "Huh! Dumb white man decorate Explorers' Club of San Francisco with too many baloons. Get hatchet. Cut door in United States between New York and San Francisco. This make good new house for Chief."

Books

• The Great Geppy (1940) concerns a red-striped horse who works for a detective agency. The agency's motto is "A suitable sleuth for all solvable crimes." If a call comes in for a case involving a stolen pearl, requiring a young lady detective who speaks Japanese and knows how to dive for pearls, the proprietors simply push the buttons labelled "Foreign Language" and "Swimmers" to summon all of their foreign language swimming detectives. Geppy is dispatched to a case involving a circus. Detailed illustrations show the progress of his investigation, and many aspects of circus life. Geppy's stripes happen to match the red-striped circus tent in width, spacing, and color, enabling him, if he wishes, to vanish from view.

• The Twenty-One Balloons (1947) concerns a schoolteacher who decides to spend a year in a balloon, but, due to an accident, lands on the island of Krakatoa. It turns out that the island is populated by twenty families who share the wealth of a secret diamond mine. They have used their wealth to build elaborate houses which also serve as restaurants. They have a calendar with a 20-day month. On A day, everyone eats in Mr. and Mrs. A's American restaurant; on B day, in Mrs. and Mrs. B's British chop house; on C day, in Mr. and Mrs. C's Chinese restaurant; on D day, in Mr. and Mrs. D's Dutch restaurant, and so forth. Mr. M's Moroccan house features many ingenious (and well-depicted) inventions, such as a living room in which the furniture is electrified like amusement-park Dodg 'em cars. When Krakatoa explodes, the families and Sherman escape on a flying platform lofted by twenty balloons.

• Peter Graves (1950) is a novel about marketing. The title character is a well-meaning but mischievous boy, who encounters a gentlemanly and not-very-mad scientist named Houghton Furlong. Furlong is the inventor of an antigravity material named Furloy, and a Furloy-based invention called "the ball that bounces higher than the height from which you drop it." In an unfortunate accident with the latter invention, Peter destroys Houghton's house. Little of value is left in the wreckage except six balls of Furloy, each about the size of a tennis ball, with an antigravity pull of 50 pounds each. Peter commits himself to spending the summer with Houghton in an attempt to earn the $45,000 necessary to rebuild his house. The implied puzzle is: how can Peter and Houghton make use of the six Furloy balls to earn $45,000?

• Squirrel Hotel (1952) is a bittersweet story about a man who builds an elaborate hotel for squirrels, with illustrations of the doll-house like structure full of squirrels sniffing, playing, sliding down spiral slides, and generating electricity for the lighting by running around a squirrel cage. The man disappears and the narrator tries to find him by tracing his purchases (48 four-poster canopied beds--in miniature, of course; 1 gross flashlight bulbs; 2 electric motors, Meccano; 6 American flags; etc.)

• The Giant (1954) is a story about an eight-year-old boy who (for some unexplained reason) has grown to be seven stories tall. Illustrations show the various arrangements family and friends have designed in order to take care of him. He is a sweet and well-mannered boy, but great effort is taken to conceal him because of the fear and hostility giants arouse. The narrator befriends him and comes up with a plan to introduce him to the public in such a way that they will accept him so that he will not need to spend his life in concealment.