1977

The Balloonist

By MacDonald Harris

Original Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Current Publisher: Galileo Publishers

New paperback edition forthcoming from The Overlook Press on October 30, 2012

Fiction Finalists That Year: 

• Raymond Carver for Will You Be Quiet, Please?
• MacDonald Harris for The Balloonist
• Ursula K. Le Guin for Orsinian Tales
• Cynthia Propper Seton for A Fine Romance 

Fiction Winner That Year: Wallace Stegner for The Spectator Bird

Fiction Judges That Year: Erskine Caldwell, George P. Elliott, Orville Prescott

The Year in Literature:

• The Pulitzer Prize was not given for fiction. 
• Vicente Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize for literature.

More Information:

• The Balloonist is a novel about a Swedish inventor and his two companions who embark on a hydrogen-balloon voyage to the North Pole at the end of the nineteenth century.
• After spending more than thirty years out of print, The Balloonist was reissued in 2011 by Galileo Publishing in the UK, with a new foreword by Philip Pullman. 

Links:

Review from The Guardian, November 8, 2011

New paperback edition forthcoming from The Overlook Press