The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Name	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Author	L. Frank Baum
Illustrator	W. W. Denslow
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	The Oz Books
Genre	Fantasy Children's novel
Publisher	George M. Hill Company
Release date	1900
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback), Audiobook
Pages	259 p., 21 leaves of plates (first edition hardcover)
Isbn	N/A
Oclc	9506808
Followed by	The Marvelous Land of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. Originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago on May 17, 1900, it has since been reprinted numerous times, most often under the name The Wizard of Oz, which is the name of both the 1902 stage play and the 1939 film version. The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. Thanks in part to the 1939 MGM movie, it is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success, and the success of the popular 1902 Broadway musical Baum adapted from his story, led to Baum's writing thirteen more Oz books. The original book has been in the public domain in the US since 1956.

Baum dedicated the book "to my good friend & comrade, My Wife", Maud Gage Baum. In January 1901, George M. Hill Company, the publisher, completed printing the first edition, which probably totaled around 35,000 copies. Records indicate that 21,000 copies were sold through 1900.

Historians, economists and literary scholars have examined and developed possible political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, the majority of the reading public simply takes the story at face value.

Background

Born on May 15, 1856, in a frame house in Chittenango, New York, Lyman Frank Baum was the seventh child of Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Baum, an affluent oil baron. Raised in Rose Lawn, the Baum country property on the outskirts of Syracuse, Baum had a sheltered upbringing. As a child, he was extremely bashful and was diagnosed with a deficient heart. Baum spent considerable time playing with his imaginary friends and reading books. When he was 18 years old, Baum spent much time around local theaters and hoped to pursue acting. Though his father initially opposed his dream, he later capitulated. Baum traveled through different states and worked at various jobs to support his acting career.

In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, daughter of suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage. His mother-in-law believed that Baum was idealistic and wrote in a letter that he was "a perfect baby". However, she urged him to put to paper the many tales he had related to his sons for many years. Maud Gage, a practical woman, served as a foil to Baum. She was consistent and wary of their finances, complementing her husband, an imaginative dreamer.

In a letter to his brother Harry, Baum wrote that the book's publisher, George M. Hill, predicted a sale of about 250,000 copies. In spite of this favorable conjecture, Hill did not initially predict the book would be phenomenally successful. He agreed to publish the book only when the manager of the Grand Opera House, Fred R. Hamlin, committed to making The Wizard of Oz into a play to publicize the novel. After Hill's publishing company became bankrupt in 1901, Baum and Denslow agreed to have the Indiannapolis-based Bobbs-Merrill Company resume publishing the novel.

Baum's son Harry Neal told the Chicago Tribune in 1944 that he told his children "whimsical stories before they became material for his books". Harry called his father the "swellest man I knew", a man who was able to give a decent reason as to why black birds cooked in a pie could afterwards get out and sing.

By 1938, over one million copies of the book had been printed. Less than two decades later, in 1956, the sales of his novel grew to 3 million copies in print.

A new edition of the book appeared in 1944, with illustrations by Evelyn Copelman. Although it was claimed that the new illustrations were based on Denslow's originals, they more closely resemble the characters as seen in the famous 1939 film version of Baum's book, starring Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr.

The distinctive look led to imitators at the time, most notably Eva Katherine Gibson's Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch, which mimicked both the typography and the illustration design of Oz. The typeface was the newly designed Monotype Old Style. Denslow's illustrations were so well-known that merchants of many products obtained permission to use them to promote their wares. The forms of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard, and Dorothy were made into rubber and metal sculptures. Costume jewelry, mechanical toys, and soap were also designed using their figures.

Themes

Baum explores the theme of self-contradiction in The Wizard of Oz. He created characters who—like humans—have complex, contradictory natures. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion all lack self-confidence. The Scarecrow believes that he has no brains, though he comes up with clever solutions to several problems that they encounter on their journey. The Tin Woodman believes that he lacks a heart, but is moved to tears when misfortune befalls the various creatures they meet. The Cowardly Lion believes that he has no courage even though he is consistently brave through their journey. Carl L. Bankston, III of Salem Press noted that "These three characters embody the classical human virtues of intelligence, caring, and courage, but their self-doubts keep them from being reduced to mere symbols of these qualities."

Local legend has it that Oz, also known as The Emerald City, was inspired by a prominent castle-like building in the community of Castle Park near Holland, Michigan where Baum summered. The yellow brick road was derived from a road at that time paved by yellow bricks. These bricks were found in Peekskill, New York where Baum attended the Peekskill Military Academy. Baum scholars often reference the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (the "White City") as an inspiration for the Emerald City. Other legends allude that the inspiration came from the Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego, California. Baum was a frequent guest at the hotel, and had written several of the Oz books there. In a 1903 interview with Publishers Weekly,

Alice in Wonderland

Another influence lay in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. A September 1900 review in the Grand Rapids Herald called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a "veritable Alice in Wonderland brought up to the present day of standard of juvenile literature".

Personal life

Many of the characters, props, and ideas in the novel were drawn from Baum's experiences. As a child, Baum frequently had nightmares of a scarecrow pursuing him across a field. Moments before the scarecrow's "ragged hay fingers" nearly gripped his neck, it would fall apart before his eyes. Decades later as an adult, Baum integrated his tormentor into the novel as the Scarecrow. According to his son Harry, the Tin Woodman was born from Baum's attraction to window displays. Because he wished to make something captivating for the window displays, he used an eclectic assortment of scraps to craft a striking figure. From a washboiler he made a body, from bolted stovepipes he made arms and legs, and from the bottom of a saucepan he made a face. Baum then placed a funnel hat on the figure, which ultimately became the Tin Woodman. John D. Rockefeller was the nemesis of Baum's father, an oil baron who declined to purchase Standard Oil shares in exchange for selling his own oil refinery. Baum scholar Evan I. Schwartz posited that Rockefeller inspired one of the Wizard of Oz's numerous faces. In one scene in the novel, the Wizard is seen as a "tyrannical, hairless head". When Rockefeller was 54 years old, the medical condition alopecia caused him to lose every strand of hair on his head, making people fearful of speaking to him.

In the early 1880s, when Baum's play Matches was being performed, a "flicker from a kerosene lantern sparked the rafters", causing the Baum opera house to be consumed by flames. Scholar Evan I. Schwartz posited that this may have inspired the Scarecrow's severest terror: "There is only one thing in the world I am afraid of. A lighted match."

In 1890, while Baum lived in Aberdeen which was experiencing a drought, he wrote a witty story in his "Our Landlady" column in Aberdeen's The Saturday Pioneer. The story was about a farmer who gave green goggles to his horses, causing them to believe that the wood chips they were eating were pieces of grass. Similarly, the Wizard made the people in the Emerald City wear green goggles so that they would believe their city was built from emeralds. Baum, a former salesman of china, wrote in chapter 20 about china that had sprung to life.

Baum's wife frequently visited her niece, Dorothy Louise Gage. The infant became gravely sick and died on November 11, 1898, of "congestion of the brain" at exactly five months. When the baby, whom Maud adored as the daughter she never had, died, she was devastated and needed to consume medicine. To assuage her distress, Frank made his protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a female named Dorothy. Uncle Henry was modeled after Henry Gage, his wife Maud's father. Bossed around by his wife Matilda, Henry rarely dissented with her. He flourished in business, though, and his neighbors looked up to him. Likewise, Uncle Henry was a "passive but hard-working man" who "looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke". The witches in the novel were influenced by witch-hunting research gathered by Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda. The stories of barbarous acts against accused witches scared Baum. Two key events in the novel involve wicked witches who both meet their death through metaphorical means.

The Gold Standard representation of the story

Baum did not offer any conclusive proof that he intended his novel to be a political allegory. Historian Ranjit S. Dighe wrote that for sixty years after the book's publication, "virtually nobody" had such an interpretation until Henry Littlefield, a high school teacher. In his 1964 American Quarterly article, "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism", Littlefield posited that the book contained an allegory of the late 19th-century bimetallism debate regarding monetary policy. At the beginning of the novel, Dorothy is swept from her farm to Oz by a cyclone, which was frequently compared to the Free Silver movement in Baum's time. The villains of the story, the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wicked Witch of the East, represent the wealthy railroad and oil barons of the American West and the financial and banking interests of the eastern U.S. respectively. Both these groups opposed Populist efforts to move the U.S. to a bimetallic monetary standard since this would have devalued the dollar and made investments less valuable. Workers and poor farmers supported the move away from the gold standard as this would have lessened their crushing debt burdens. The Populist party sought to build a coalition of southern and midwestern tenant farmers and northern industrial workers. These groups are represented in the book by the Good Witches of the North and South. "Oz" is the abbreviated form of ounce, a standard measure of gold.

Littlefield's thesis achieved some popular interest and elaboration but is not taken seriously by literary historians.

Bradley A. Hansen, a professor of economics at the University of Mary Washington, disagreed that the novel is a monetary allegory. He argued that the numerous intersections between both the individuals and happenings in the novel and those in the 1896 presidential election are the central evidence upon which proponents of the allegory depend. Further stating that research has shown that neither Baum's works nor his life history indicate that he supported Populism, Hansen concluded that "the true lesson of The Wizard of Oz may be that economists have been too willing to accept as a truth an elegant story with little empirical support, much the way the characters in Oz accepted the Wizard's impressive tricks as real magic". However, its fame has greatly increased mainly because of the many network telecasts of the 1939 film version of the book.

In 1967, The Seekers recorded "Emerald City", with lyrics about a visit there, set to the melody of Beethoven's "An die Freude".

In 1995, Gregory Maguire published , a revisionist look at the land and characters of Oz. Instead of depicting Dorothy, the novel was about the Wicked Witch of the West. The Independent characterized the novel as an "an adult read reflecting on the nature of being an outcast, society's pressures to conform, and the effects of oppression and fascism". Universal Pictures, which bought the novel's rights, initially intended to make it into a film. Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz convinced the company to make the novel into a musical instead. Schwartz wrote Wickeds music and lyrics, and it premiered on Broadway in October 2003.

Critical response

}}

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz received positive critical reviews upon release. In a September 1900 review, The New York Times praised the novel, writing that it would appeal to child readers and to younger children who could not read yet. The review also praised the illustrations for being a pleasant complement to the text.

It has repeatedly come under fire over the years. In 1957, the director of Detroit's libraries banned The Wizard of Oz for having "no value" for children of today, for supporting "negativism", and for bringing children's minds to a "cowardly level". Professor Russel B. Nye of Michigan State University countered that "if the message of the Oz books—love, kindness, and unselfishness make the world a better place—seems of no value today", then maybe the time is ripe for "reassess[ing] a good many other things besides the Detroit library's approved list of children's books".

In 1986, seven Fundamentalist Christians families in Tennessee opposed the novel's inclusion in the public school syllabus and filed a lawsuit. They based their opposition to the novel on its depicting benevolent witches and promoting the belief that integral human attributes were "individually developed rather than God given". Other reasons included the novel's teaching that females are equal to males and that animals are personified and can speak. The judge ruled that when the novel was being discussed in class, the parents were allowed to have their children leave the classroom.

Providing a twenty-first century perspective about the novel, Leonard Everett Fisher of The Horn Book Magazine wrote in 2000 that Oz has "a timeless message from a less complex era, and it continues to resonate". The challenge of valuing oneself during impending adversity has not, Fisher noted, lessened during the prior 100 years.

In a 2002 review, Bill Delaney of Salem Press praised Baum for giving children the opportunity to discover magic in the mundane things in their everyday lives. He further commended Baum for teaching "millions of children to love reading during their crucial formative years". By its centennial, the novel had been translated into 22 languages such as Tamil and Serbo-Croatian. Robert Sabuda created a pop-up book to commemorate the book's centennial. Baum scholar Michael Patrick Hearn called the book a "fond tribute" to W. W. Denslow and an "inventive interpretation" of Baum's novel. Sabuda used Denslow's first edition illustrations as "color linoleum cuts" and improved upon them by portraying the features that Denslow failed to capture.

The 2002 Sterling Publishing edition of the novel was illustrated by Michael Foreman with bright watercolors. Reviewer Heide Piehler of School Library Journal applauded Foreman for his "skillful command of color and light to emphasize the story's sense of adventure and enchantment". Piehler also admired the "subtle humorous details", including the winged monkeys' adorned with "Red Baron-style googles". In her generally favorable review, she critiqued Foreman's depiction of a normal Dorothy as a "disappointment". Baum also wrote sequels in 1907, 1908, and 1909. In his 1911 The Emerald City of Oz, he wrote that he could not continue writing sequels because Ozland had lost contact with the rest of the world. The children refused to accept this story, so Baum, in 1913 and every year thereafter until his death in May 1919, wrote an Oz book. The Chicago Tribunes Russell MacFall wrote that Baum explained the purpose of his novels in a note he penned to his sister, Mary Louise Brewster, in a copy of Mother Goose in Prose (1897), his first book. He wrote, "To please a child is a sweet and a lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward."

The story has been translated into other languages (at least once without permission), and adapted into comics several times. Following the lapse of the original copyright, the characters have been adapted and reused in spin-offs, unofficial sequels, and reinterpretations, some of which have been controversial in their treatment of Baum's characters.

See also

1930 in literature

The Secret of Oz

Notes and references

;Notes

;Footnotes

;Bibliography

Aycock, Colleen and Mark Scott (2008). Joe Gans: A Biography of the First African American World Boxing Champion. McFarland & Co, 133–139.

Baum, Frank Joslyn; MacFall, Russell P. (1961). To Please a Child. Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co.

Culver, Stuart. "Growing Up in Oz." American Literary History 4 (1992) 607–28.

Dighe, Ranjit S. (ed.) The Historian's Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory (2002)

Gardner, Martin; Nye, Russel B. (1994). The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press

Gardner, Todd. "Responses to Littlefield" (2004), online

Greene, David L.; Martin, Dick (1977). The Oz Scrapbook. Random House.

Hanff, Peter E and Douglas G. Greene (1988). Bibliographia Oziana: A Concise Bibliographical Checklist. The International Wizard of Oz Club. ISBN 978-1-930764-03-3

Hearn, Michael Patrick (ed). (2000, 1973) The Annotated Wizard of Oz. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-04992-2

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a 'Parable on Populism'." Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians. 16 (1994): 49–63">Parker, David B. (1994) "The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a 'Parable on Populism'." Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians. 16 (1994): 49–63

Riley, Michael O. (1997) Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. University of Kansas Press ISBN 0-7006-0832-X

Ritter, Gretchen. "Silver slippers and a golden cap: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and historical memory in American politics." Journal of American Studies (August 1997) vol. 31, no. 2, 171–203.

Rockoff, Hugh. "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a Monetary Allegory," Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990): 739–60 online at JSTOR

Sherman, Fraser A. (2005). The Wizard of Oz catalog: L. Frank Baum's novel, its sequels and their adaptations for stage, television, movies, radio, music videos, comic books, commercials and more. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. ISBN 0786417927

Sunshine, Linda. All Things Oz (2003)

Swartz, Mark Evan. Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" on Stage and Screen to 1939 (2000).

Velde, Francois R. "Following the Yellow Brick Road: How the United States Adopted the Gold Standard" Economic Perspectives. Volume: 26. Issue: 2. 2002. also online here

Public Relations Quarterly, Fall 1998">Ziaukas, Tim. "100 Years of Oz: Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' as Gilded Age Public Relations" in Public Relations Quarterly, Fall 1998

External links

"Down the Yellow Brick Road of Overinterpretation," by John J. Miller in the Wall Street Journal

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Audio Book a Librivox project.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900 illustrated copy), Publisher's green and red illustrated cloth over boards; illustrated endpapers. Plate detached. Public Domain – Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, full text and audio.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, an unabridged dramatic audio performance at Wired for Books.

The Baum Bugle: A Journal of Oz published by The International Wizard of Oz Club, provides frequent critical and historical information about L. Frank Baum and the Oz Series.

Category:1900 novels Category:Children's fantasy novels Category:Oz books Category:Series of children's books Category:Literature featuring anthropomorphic characters Category:Novels set in Kansas Category:American children's novels Category:1900s fantasy novels