The Best 20th-Century Books for Kids

A puppeteer who loves impossible problems invents the enormous floating balloons of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Three astronauts climb into a spacecraft about the size of a car and ride a thirty-story rocket off the planet.

A suitcase, a handful of clues, and a jazz-band flyer send ten-year-old Bud across Depression-era Michigan in search of his father.

Claudia plans a first-class runaway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then finds a mystery too good to leave unsolved.

Before the chimpanzees of Gombe came a backyard, a notebook, and a girl who never stopped watching.

A shy, musical child grows into the neighbor who made television slower, kinder, and far more attentive to children.

A great-grandfather who could not write kept his journey from Italy to America in matchboxes, one tiny object at a time.

A boy imagines riding beside a beam of light and follows the question until it changes physics.

Five sisters turn library trips, penny treats, household chores, and Jewish holidays into a warm portrait of Lower East Side life.

The girl once told she might never walk becomes the fastest woman in the world and wins three Olympic gold medals.

A movie star spends her evenings at a drafting table, designing a radio signal that cannot be jammed.

A curious musician takes guitars, microphones, and recording machines apart until popular music can do things it never did before.

Apollo 11’s lunar module pilot explains the machines, maneuvers, checklists, and teamwork behind the first Moon landing.

A boy who sees numbers everywhere grows into a wandering mathematician who solves problems by thinking alongside other people.

Four children and their hardworking mother make one year in a yellow house into a hundred small adventures.