Tag: wicked

Books: The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Little Wizard Stories Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Notes And Links

The 1907 first edition front cover image shown at the top of this page is © John R. Neill and is in the Public Domain via Wikipedia.

Project Gutenberg – Project Gutenberg is an online library of free e-books and was the first provider of free electronic books. Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, invented e-books in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of them and related content today.

The Wonderful Wiki of Oz – Official website. A wonderful and welcoming encyclopedia of all things Oz that anyone can edit or contribute Oz-related information and Oz facts to enjoy.

The Oz Archive on Facebook – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Twitter – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Instagram – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on TikTok – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

Books: The Marvelous Land Of Oz By L. Frank Baum

You can download this book and the thirteen other fantasy books in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum via Project Gutenberg by clicking here.

About The Marvelous Land Of Oz

The Marvelous Land of Oz, published in July 1904, is the second of L. Frank Baum’s books set in the Land of Oz, and the sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). This and the next 34 Oz books of the famous 40 were illustrated by John R. Neill. The book was made into an episode of The Shirley Temple Show in 1960, and into a Canada/Japan co-produced animated series of the same name in 1986. It was also adapted in comic book form by Marvel Comics; once in 1975 in the Marvel Treasury of Oz series, and again in an eight-issue series with the first issue being released in November 2009. Plot elements from The Marvelous Land of Oz are included in the 1985 Disney feature film Return to Oz.

The Plot

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this bit if you haven’t read the book and are planning to do so!

The events are set shortly after the events in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and after Dorothy Gale’s departure back to Kansas. The protagonist of the novel is an orphan boy called Tip. For as long as he can remember, Tip has been under the guardianship of a cruel Wicked Witch named Mombi and lives in the northern quadrant of Oz called Gillikin Country. Mombi has always been extremely mean and abusive to Tip. As Mombi is returning home one day, Tip plans to get revenge and frighten her with a wooden man he has made, with a large Jack-o’-lantern he carves for a head, thus naming him Jack Pumpkinhead. To Tip’s dismay, Mombi is not fooled by this trick, and she takes this opportunity to demonstrate the new magical Powder of Life that she had just obtained from another sorcerer. Mombi tells Tip that she intends to transform him into a marble statue to punish him for his mischievous ways.

In order to avoid being turned into a marble statue, Tip runs away with Jack that very same night and steals the Powder of Life. He uses it to animate the wooden Sawhorse for Jack to ride. The Sawhorse runs so quickly that Tip is left behind. Walking alone, he meets General Jinjur’s all-girl Army of Revolt, which is planning to overthrow the Scarecrow (who has ruled the Emerald City since the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). Meanwhile, Jack and the Sawhorse arrive at the Emerald City and make the acquaintance of His Majesty the Scarecrow. Jinjur and her crew invade the Emerald City, terrorize the citizens, and loot the city, causing great havoc and chaos. Tip joins Jack and the Scarecrow in the palace, and they escape on the Sawhorse’s back.

The companions arrive at the tin castle of the Tin Woodman (who now rules the Winkie Kingdom following the Wicked Witch of the West’s demise in the first book) and plan to retake the Emerald City with his help. On their way back, they are diverted by the magic of Mombi (whom Jinjur recruited to help her apprehend them). They are joined by the “Highly Magnified and Thoroughly Educated” Woggle-Bug and aided by the loyal field mice and their Mouse Queen. The Queen of the field mice allows the Scarecrow to take twelve mice concealed in his straw. When the party reaches the Emerald City, Jinjur and her soldiers imprison the group and lock them away. However, the female soldiers are scared by the field mice and leave the city’s palace. However, they still occupy the grounds of the city, and the palace is surrounded. The travellers are imprisoned in the palace. The Scarecrow proposes manufacturing a clever flying machine with a Gump’s stuffed head to direct it. Tip uses the powder of life to animate this machine, which is assembled from the palace furniture, and they fly off, with no control over their direction, out of Oz. They land in a nest of jackdaws, which is full of all of the birds’ stolen goods. The flying Gump’s wings are damaged in the landing.

The jackdaws return to their nest and attack the travellers, carrying off the Scarecrow’s straw. The nest contains a large amount of paper money, with which the Scarecrow can be re-stuffed. Using Wishing Pills they discover in the container holding the Powder of Life, Tip and his friends escape and journey to the palace of Glinda the Good Witch in Oz’s southern quadrant, the Quadling Country. They learn from Glinda that after the fall of Oz’s mortal king Pastoria decades ago, a long lost princess named Ozma was hidden away in secrecy when the Wizard of Oz took the throne. She also informs them that Ozma is the rightful ruler of the Emerald City and all of Oz in general, not the Scarecrow (who did not really want the job anyway). Glinda, therefore, accompanies Tip, Jack, the Sawhorse, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Wogglebug, and the Gump back to the Emerald City to see Mombi. The crooked woman tries to deceive them by disguising a chambermaid named Jellia Jamb as herself (which fails) but manages to elude them as they search for her in the Emerald City. Just as their time runs out, the Tin Woodman plucks a rose to wear in his lapel, unaware that this is the transformed Mombi.

Glinda discovers the deception right away and leads the pursuit of Mombi, who is finally caught as she tries to cross the Deadly Desert in the form of a fast and long-running griffin. Under pressure from Glinda, Mombi confesses that the Wizard brought her the infant Ozma, whom she transformed into … the boy Tip. At first, Tip is utterly shocked and appalled to learn this, but Glinda and his friends help him to accept his duty, and Mombi performs her last spell to undo the curse, turning him back into the fairy princess Ozma.

The restored Ozma is established on the throne after defeating Jinjur and her army. The Tin Woodman invites the Scarecrow to return with him to the Winkie Country along with Jack Pumpkinhead. The Gump is disassembled at his request (though his head was a hunting trophy that can still speak), Glinda returns to her palace in Quadling Country, the Wogglebug remains as Ozma’s advisor, and the Sawhorse becomes Ozma’s personal steed. The forgotten prophecy is finally fulfilled and Oz is politically whole once more, with Ozma in her rightful position as the child Queen of Oz.

Stage Elements

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had been transformed into a stage play, and several elements of the sequel book were clearly incorporated with an eye to it also being adapted for the stage. The Marvelous Land of Oz was dedicated to David C. Montgomery and Fred Stone, the comedians “whose clever personations of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow have delighted thousands of children throughout the land…” in the 1902 stage adaptation of the first Oz book. Following the Tin Woodman’s and the Scarecrow’s importance to the play, similar importance is given them this work, where neither Dorothy nor the Cowardly Lion appears.

The Marvelous Land of Oz was also influenced by the story and vaudevillian tone of the stage play. The character of the Wizard was in the book a good man though a bad wizard but in the play, the villain of the piece; this is reflected by the evil part he is described as having played in the back story of this work. The two armies of women, both Jinjur’s and Glinda’s, were so clearly intended as future chorus girls that even reviews of the book noted the similarity.

It has been suggested that the twist of Tip being the Princess Ozma also reflects stage traditions, as Tip would have likely have been played by a woman in drag.

Dramatic Adaptations

One early reviewer of The Marvelous Land of Oz noted that some details in the book clearly appeared to be designed for a stage production—in particular, “General Jinjur and her soldiers are only shapely chorus girls.” Since the stage adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had been a huge hit, with two companies still touring the country as the second book was published, the reviewer’s suspicion was both natural and accurate: Baum wrote a stage adaptation called The Woggle-Bug that was produced in Chicago the summer of 1905. The detail of Tip/Ozma’s sex change, which can raise a range of psychological speculations in modern readers, made perfect sense in terms of early twentieth-century stage practice, since the juvenile male role of Tip would have been played by an actress as a matter of course. The musical score was composed by Frederic Chapin, and Fred Mace played the Woggle-Bug. Baum had wanted Fred Stone and David Montgomery to reprise their roles as the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman for the second show, but the two refused, fearing typecasting, and the characters were omitted completely from the play. The play was not successful.

In addition to being part of the basis for Baum’s The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, Land of Oz was the final 1910 Selig Polyscope Oz film, and has been brought to the screen several additional times. The Land of Oz, a Sequel to the Wizard of Oz was a two-reel production by the Meglin Kiddies made in 1931 and released in 1932. The film was recently recovered, but the soundtrack of the second reel is missing. The Wonderful Land of Oz (1969) was a studio-bound production by independent filmmaker Barry Mahon, which starred his son, Channy, as Tip. Mahon had previously produced nudie films; however, those films were made in New York, while Oz was made in Florida, and neither Caroline Berner (as Jinjur) nor the rest of her army were drawn from his former casts. Filmation’s Journey Back to Oz (1971), recast the army of revolt with green elephants and Tip with Dorothy but was essentially an unaccredited adaptation of this book. Elements from this novel and the following one, Ozma of Oz, were incorporated into the 1985 film Return to Oz featuring Fairuza Balk as Dorothy. It is also adapted in Ozu no Mahōtsukai and the Russian animated film, Adventures of the Emerald City: Princess Ozma (2000).

Read more about Dramatic Adaptions and The Marvelous Land Of Oz here.

The above articles were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

Blog Posts

Books: The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Little Wizard Stories Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Notes And Links

The 1904 first edition front cover image shown at the top of this page is © John R. Neill and is in the Public Domain via Wikipedia.

The Wonderful Wiki of Oz – Official website. A wonderful and welcoming encyclopedia of all things Oz that anyone can edit or contribute Oz-related information and Oz facts to enjoy.

The Oz Archive on Facebook – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Twitter – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Instagram – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on TikTok – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

Books: The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz By L. Frank Baum

You can download this book and the thirteen other fantasy books in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum via Project Gutenberg by clicking here.

About The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an American children’s novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. The first novel in the Oz series, the story chronicles the adventures of a young Kansas farm girl named Dorothy in the magical Land of Oz after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their home by a tornado. Upon her arrival in Oz, she learns she cannot return home until she has destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West.

The book was first published in the United States in May 1900 by the George M. Hill Company. In January 1901, the publishing company completed printing the first edition, a total of 10,000 copies, which quickly sold out. It had sold three million copies by the time it entered the public domain in 1956. It was often reprinted under the title The Wizard of Oz, which is the title of the successful 1902 Broadway musical adaptation as well as the classic 1939 live-action film.

The ground-breaking success of both the original 1900 novel and the 1902 Broadway musical prompted Baum to write thirteen additional Oz books which serve as official sequels to the first story. Over a century later, the book is one of the best-known stories in American literature, and the Library of Congress has declared the work to be “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale.”

Publication

L. Frank Baum’s story was published by George M. Hill Company. The first edition had a printing of 10,000 copies and was sold in advance of the publication date of September 1, 1900. On May 17, 1900, the first copy came off the press; Baum assembled it by hand and presented it to his sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster. The public saw it for the first time at a book fair at the Palmer House in Chicago, July 5–20. Its copyright was registered on August 1; full distribution followed in September. By October 1900, it had already sold out and the second edition of 15,000 copies was nearly depleted.

In a letter to his brother, Baum wrote that the book’s publisher, George M. Hill, predicted a sale of about 250,000 copies. In spite of this favourable conjecture, Hill did not initially predict that the book would be phenomenally successful. He agreed to publish the book only when the manager of the Chicago Grand Opera House, Fred R. Hamlin, committed to making it into a musical stage play to publicize the novel.

The play The Wizard of Oz debuted on June 16, 1902. It was revised to suit adult preferences and was crafted as a “musical extravaganza,” with the costumes modelled after Denslow’s drawings. When Hill’s publishing company became bankrupt in 1901, the Indianapolis-based Bobbs-Merrill Company resumed publishing the novel. By 1938, more than one million copies of the book had been printed. By 1956, sales had grown to three million copies.

The Plot

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this bit if you haven’t read the book and are planning to do so!

Dorothy is a young girl who lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and dog, Toto, on a farm on the Kansas prairie. One day, she and Toto are caught up in a cyclone that deposits them and the farmhouse into Munchkin Country in the magical Land of Oz. The falling house has killed the Wicked Witch of the East, the evil ruler of the Munchkins. The Good Witch of the North arrives with three grateful Munchkins and gives Dorothy the magical silver shoes that once belonged to the Wicked Witch. The Good Witch tells Dorothy that the only way she can return home is to follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and ask the great and powerful Wizard of Oz to help her. As Dorothy embarks on her journey, the Good Witch of the North kisses her on the forehead, giving her magical protection from harm.

On her way down the yellow brick road, Dorothy attends a banquet held by a Munchkin named Boq. The next day, she frees a Scarecrow from the pole on which he is hanging, applies oil from a can to the rusted joints of a Tin Woodman, and meets a Cowardly Lion. The Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Woodman wants a heart, and the Lion wants courage, so Dorothy encourages them to journey with her and Toto to the Emerald City to ask for help from the Wizard.

After several adventures, the travellers arrive at the Emerald City and meet the Guardian of the Gates, who asks them to wear green-tinted spectacles to keep their eyes from being blinded by the city’s brilliance. Each one is called to see the Wizard. He appears to Dorothy as a giant head, to the Scarecrow as a lovely lady, to the Tin Woodman as a terrible beast, and to the Lion as a ball of fire. He agrees to help them all if they kill the Wicked Witch of the West, who rules over Winkie Country. The Guardian warns them that no one has ever managed to defeat the witch.

The Wicked Witch of the West sees the travellers approaching with her one telescopic eye. She sends a pack of wolves to tear them to pieces, but the Tin Woodman kills them with his axe. She sends a flock of wild crows to peck their eyes out, but the Scarecrow kills them by twisting their necks. She summons a swarm of black bees to sting them, but they are killed while trying to sting the Tin Woodman while the Scarecrow’s straw hides the others. She sends a dozen of her Winkie slaves to attack them, but the Lion stands firm to repel them. Finally, she uses the power of her Golden Cap to send the Winged Monkeys to capture Dorothy, Toto, and the Lion, unstuff the Scarecrow, and dent the Tin Woodman. Dorothy is forced to become the witch’s personal slave, while the witch schemes to steal her silver shoes.

The witch successfully tricks Dorothy out of one of her silver shoes. Angered, she throws a bucket of water at the witch and is shocked to see her melt away. The Winkies rejoice at being freed from her tyranny and help restuff the Scarecrow and mend the Tin Woodman. They ask the Tin Woodman to become their ruler, which he agrees to do after helping Dorothy return to Kansas. Dorothy finds the witch’s Golden Cap and summons the Winged Monkeys to carry her and her friends back to the Emerald City. The King of the Winged Monkeys tells how he and his band are bound by an enchantment to the cap by the sorceress Gayelette from the North, and that Dorothy may use it to summon them two more times.

When Dorothy and her friends meet the Wizard again, Toto tips over a screen in a corner of the throne room that reveals the Wizard, who sadly explains he is a humbug—an ordinary old man who, by a hot air balloon, came to Oz long ago from Omaha. He provides the Scarecrow with a head full of bran, pins, and needles (“a lot of bran-new brains”), the Tin Woodman with a silk heart stuffed with sawdust, and the Lion a potion of courage. Their faith in his power gives these items a focus for their desires. He decides to take Dorothy and Toto home and then go back to Omaha in his balloon. At the send-off, he appoints the Scarecrow to rule in his stead, which he agrees to do after helping Dorothy return to Kansas. Toto chases a kitten in the crowd and Dorothy goes after him, but the ropes holding the balloon break and the Wizard floats away.

Dorothy summons the Winged Monkeys and tells them to carry her and Toto home, but they explain they can’t cross the desert surrounding Oz. The Soldier with the Green Whiskers informs Dorothy that Glinda, the Good Witch of the South may be able to help her return home, so the travellers begin their journey to see Glinda’s castle in Quadling Country. On the way, the Lion kills a giant spider who is terrorizing the animals in a forest. They ask him to become their king, which he agrees to do after helping Dorothy return to Kansas. Dorothy summons the Winged Monkeys a third time to fly them over a hill to Glinda’s castle.

Glinda greets them and reveals that Dorothy’s silver shoes can take her anywhere she wishes to go. She embraces her friends, all of whom will be returned to their new kingdoms through Glinda’s three uses of the Golden Cap: the Scarecrow to the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman to Winkie Country, and the Lion to the forest; after which the cap will be given to the King of the Winged Monkeys, freeing him and his band. Dorothy takes Toto in her arms, knocks her heels together three times, and wishes to return home. Instantly, she begins whirling through the air and rolling on the grass of the Kansas prairie, up to the farmhouse, though the silver shoes fall off her feet en route and are lost in the Deadly Desert. She runs to Aunt Em, saying “I’m so glad to be home again!”

Illustrations

The book was illustrated by Baum’s friend and collaborator W. W. Denslow, who also co-held the copyright. The design was lavish for the time, with illustrations on many pages, backgrounds in different colours, and several colour plate illustrations. The typeface featured the newly designed Monotype Old Style. In September 1900, The Grand Rapids Herald wrote that Denslow’s illustrations are “quite as much of the story as in the writing”. The editorial opined that had it not been for Denslow’s pictures, the readers would be unable to picture precisely the figures of Dorothy, Toto, and the other characters.

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 jewellery, mechanical toys, and soap were also designed using their figures. The distinctive look of Denslow’s illustrations 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.

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.

Creative Inspiration

L. Frank Baum’s Personal Life

According to Baum’s son, Harry Neal, the author had often 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.

Many of the characters, props, and ideas in the novel were drawn from Baum’s personal life and experiences. Baum held different jobs, moved a lot, and was exposed to many people, so the inspiration for the story could have been taken from many different aspects of his life. In the introduction to the story, Baum writes that “it aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

Scarecrow And The Tin Woodman

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

According to Baum’s son Harry, the Tin Woodman was born from Baum’s attraction to window displays. He wished to make something captivating for the window displays, so he used an eclectic assortment of scraps to craft a striking figure. From a wash-boiler, 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.

Dorothy, Uncle Henry, And The Witches

Baum’s wife Maud Gage frequently visited their newborn niece, Dorothy Louise Gage, whom she adored as the daughter she never had. The infant became gravely sick and died aged five months in Bloomington, Illinois on November 11, 1898, from the congestion of the brain. Maud was devastated. To assuage her distress, Frank made his protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a girl named Dorothy, and he dedicated the book to his wife. The baby was buried at Evergreen Cemetery, where her gravestone has a statue of the character Dorothy placed next to it.

Decades later, Jocelyn Burdick—the daughter of Baum’s other niece Magdalena Carpenter and a former Democratic U.S. Senator from North Dakota—asserted that her mother also partly inspired the character of Dorothy. Burdick claimed that her great-uncle spent “considerable time at the Сarpenter homestead… and became very attached to Magdalena.” Burdick has reported many similarities between her mother’s homestead and the farm of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.

Uncle Henry was modelled after Henry Gage, Baum’s father-in-law. Bossed around by his wife Matilda, Henry rarely dissented with her. He flourished in business, though, and his neighbours 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 Matilda Gage. The stories of barbarous acts against accused witches scared Baum. Two key events in the novel involve wicked witches who meet their death through metaphorical means.

The Emerald City And The Land Of Oz

In 1890, Baum lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota during a drought, and he wrote a witty story in his “Our Landlady” column in Aberdeen’s The Saturday Pioneer about a farmer who gave green goggles to his horses, causing them to believe that the wood chips that 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 that their city was built from emeralds.

During Baum’s short stay in Aberdeen, the dissemination of myths about the plentiful West continued. However, the West, instead of being a wonderland, turned into a wasteland because of a drought and a depression. In 1891, Baum moved his family from South Dakota to Chicago. At that time, Chicago was getting ready for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Scholar Laura Barrett stated that Chicago was “considerably more akin to Oz than to Kansas”. After discovering that the myths about the West’s incalculable riches were baseless, Baum created “an extension of the American frontier in Oz”. In many respects, Baum’s creation is similar to the actual frontier save for the fact that the West was still undeveloped at the time. The Munchkins Dorothy encounters at the beginning of the novel represent farmers, as do the Winkies she later meets.

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 lived during the summer. The yellow brick road was derived from a road at that time paved by yellow bricks, located in Peekskill, New York, where Baum attended the Peekskill Military Academy. Baum scholars often refer to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (the “White City”) as an inspiration for the Emerald City. Other legends suggest 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 The Publishers’ Weekly, Baum said that the name Oz came from his file cabinet labelled “O–Z”.

Some critics have suggested that Baum’s Oz may have been inspired by Australia. Australia is often colloquially spelt or referred to as Oz. Furthermore, in Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy gets back to Oz as the result of a storm at sea while she and Uncle Henry are travelling by ship to Australia. Like Australia, Oz is an island continent somewhere to the west of California with inhabited regions bordering on a great desert. Baum perhaps intended Oz to be Australia or a magical land in the centre of the great Australian desert.

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

In addition to being influenced by the fairy-tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Baum was significantly influenced by English writer Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Although Baum found the plot of Carroll’s novel to be incoherent, he identified the book’s source of popularity as Alice herself—a child with whom younger readers could identify, and this influenced Baum’s choice of Dorothy as his protagonist.

Baum also was influenced by Carroll’s views that all children’s books should be lavishly illustrated, be pleasurable to read, and not contain any moral lessons. During the Victorian era, Carroll had rejected the popular expectation that children’s books must be saturated with moral lessons and instead he contended that children should be allowed to be children.

Although influenced by Carroll’s distinctly English work, Baum nonetheless sought to create a story that had recognizable American elements, such as farming and industrialization. Consequently, Baum combined the conventional features of a fairy tale such as witches and wizards with well-known fixtures in his young readers’ Midwestern lives such as scarecrows and cornfields.

Influence Of Denslow

The original illustrator of the novel, W. W. Denslow, aided in the development of Baum’s story and greatly influenced the way it has been interpreted. Baum and Denslow had a close working relationship and worked together to create the presentation of the story through the images and the text. Colour is an important element of the story and is present throughout the images, with each chapter having a different colour representation. Denslow also added characteristics to his drawings that Baum never described. For example, Denslow drew a house and the gates of the Emerald City with faces on them.

In the later Oz books, John R. Neill, who illustrated all the sequels, continued to use elements from Denslow’s earlier illustrations, including faces on the Emerald City’s gates. Another aspect is the Tin Woodman’s funnel hat, which is not mentioned in the text until later books but appears in most artists’ interpretation of the character, including the stage and film productions of 1902–09, 1908, 1910, 1914, 1925, 1931, 1933, 1939, 1982, 1985, 1988, 1992, and others. One of the earliest illustrators not to include a funnel hat was Russell H. Schulz in the 1957 Whitman Publishing edition—Schulz depicted him wearing a pot on his head. Libico Maraja’s illustrations, which first appeared in a 1957 Italian edition and have also appeared in English-language and other editions, are well known for depicting him bareheaded.

Allusions To 19th-Century America

Many decades after its publication, Baum’s work gave rise to a number of political interpretations, particularly in regards to the 19th-century Populist movement in the United States. In a 1964 American Quarterly article titled “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism”, educator Henry Littlefield posited that the book served as an allegory for the late 19th-century bimetallism debate regarding monetary policy. Littlefield’s thesis achieved some support but was widely criticized by others. Other political interpretations soon followed. In 1971, historian Richard J. Jensen theorized in The Winning of the Midwest that Oz was derived from the common abbreviation for “ounce”, used for denoting quantities of gold and silver.

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.

During the subsequent decades after the novel’s publication in 1900, it received little critical analysis from scholars of children’s literature. Lists of suggested reading published for juvenile readers never contained Baum’s work, and his works were rarely assigned in classrooms. This lack of interest stemmed from the scholars’ misgivings about fantasy, as well as their belief that lengthy series had little literary merit.

It frequently came under fire in later decades. In 1957, the director of Detroit’s libraries banned The Wonderful 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 Christian 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”. One parent said, “I do not want my children seduced into godless supernaturalism”. 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.

In April 2000, the Library of Congress declared The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to be “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale”, also naming it the first American fantasy for children and one of the most-read children’s books. 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. Two years later, 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”. In 2012 it was ranked number 41 on a list of the top 100 children’s novels published by School Library Journal.

Editions

After George M. Hill’s bankruptcy in 1902, copyright in the book passed to the Bowen-Merrill Company of Indianapolis. The company published most of Baum’s other books from 1901 to 1903 (Father Goose, His Book (reprint), The Magical Monarch of Mo (reprint), American Fairy Tales (reprint), Dot and Tot of Merryland (reprint), The Master Key, The Army Alphabet, The Navy Alphabet, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Enchanted Island of Yew, The Songs of Father Goose) initially under the title The New Wizard of Oz. The word “New” was quickly dropped in subsequent printings, leaving the now-familiar shortened title, “The Wizard of Oz,” and some minor textual changes were added, such as to “yellow daisies,” and changing a chapter title from “The Rescue” to “How the Four Were Reunited.” The editions they published lacked most of the in-text colour and colour plates of the original. Many cost-cutting measures were implemented, including removal of some of the colour printing without replacing it with black, printing nothing rather than the beard of the Soldier with the Green Whiskers.

When Baum filed for bankruptcy after his critically and popularly successful film and stage production The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays failed to make back its production costs, Baum lost the rights to all of the books published by what was now called Bobbs-Merrill, and they were licensed to the M. A. Donahue Company, which printed them in significantly cheaper “blotting paper” editions with advertising that directly competed with Baum’s more recent books, published by the Reilly & Britton Company, from which he was making his living, explicitly hurting sales of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the new Oz book for 1913, to boost sales of Wizard, which Donahue called in a full-page ad in The Publishers’ Weekly (June 28, 1913), Baum’s “one pre-eminently great Juvenile Book.” In a letter to Baum dated December 31, 1914, F.K. Reilly lamented that the average buyer employed by a retail store would not understand why he should be expected to spend 75 cents for a copy of Tik-Tok of Oz when he could buy a copy of Wizard for between 33 and 36 cents. Baum had previously written a letter complaining about the Donahue deal, which he did not know about until it was fait accompli, and one of the investors who held The Wizard of Oz rights had inquired why the royalty was only five or six cents per copy, depending on quantity sold, which made no sense to Baum.

A new edition from Bobbs-Merrill in 1949 illustrated by Evelyn Copelman, again titled The New Wizard of Oz, paid lip service to Denslow but was based strongly, apart from the Lion, on the MGM movie. Copelman had illustrated a new edition of The Magical Monarch of Mo two years earlier.

It was not until the book entered the public domain in 1956 that new editions, either with the original colour plates, or new illustrations, proliferated. A revised version of Copelman’s artwork was published in a Grosset & Dunlap edition, and Reilly & Lee (formerly Reilly & Britton) published an edition in line with the Oz sequels, which had previously treated The Marvelous Land of Oz as the first Oz book, not having the publication rights to Wizard, with new illustrations by Dale Ulrey. Ulrey had previously illustrated Jack Snow’s Jaglon and the Tiger-Faries, an expansion of a Baum short story, The Story of Jaglon, and a 1955 edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz, though both sold poorly. Later Reilly & Lee editions used Denslow’s original illustrations.

Notable more recent editions are the 1986 Pennyroyal edition illustrated by Barry Moser, which was reprinted by the University of California Press, and the 2000 The Annotated Wizard of Oz edited by Michael Patrick Hearn (heavily revised from a 1972 edition that was printed in a wide format that allowed for it to be a facsimile of the original edition with notes and additional illustrations at the sides), which was published by W. W. Norton and included all the original colour illustrations, as well as supplemental artwork by Denslow. Other centennial editions included University Press of Kansas’s Kansas Centennial Edition, illustrated by Michael McCurdy with black-and-white illustrations, and Robert Sabuda’s pop-up book.

Read more about The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz here.

The above articles were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

Blog Posts

Books: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Little Wizard Stories Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Notes And Links

The 1900 first edition front cover image shown at the top of this page is © W. W. Denslow and is in the Public Domain via Wikipedia.

The Wonderful Wiki of Oz – Official website. A wonderful and welcoming encyclopedia of all things Oz that anyone can edit or contribute Oz-related information and Oz facts to enjoy.

The Oz Archive on Facebook – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Twitter – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Instagram – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on TikTok – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

Books: L. Frank Baum

You can download all of the fourteen fantasy books in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum via Project Gutenberg by clicking on The Oz Series By L. Frank Baum link in Blog Posts below.

About L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was an American author best known for his children’s books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels (not including four lost, unpublished novels), 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts. He made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen; the 1939 adaptation of the first Oz book became a landmark of 20th-century cinema.

Born and raised in upstate New York, Baum moved west after an unsuccessful stint as a theatre producer and playwright. He and his wife opened a store in South Dakota and he edited and published a newspaper. They then moved to Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and published children’s literature, coming out with the first Oz book in 1900. While continuing his writing, among his final projects he sought to establish a movie studio focused on children’s films in Los Angeles, California.

His works anticipated such later commonplaces as television, augmented reality, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), women in high-risk and action-heavy occupations (Mary Louise in the Country), and the ubiquity of clothes advertising (Aunt Jane’s Nieces at Work).

L. Frank Baum’s Childhood And Early Life

Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, in 1856 into a devout Methodist family. He had German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. He was the seventh of nine children of Cynthia Ann (née Stanton) and Benjamin Ward Baum, only five of whom survived into adulthood. “Lyman” was the name of his father’s brother, but he always disliked it and preferred his middle name, Frank.

His father succeeded in many businesses, including barrel-making, oil drilling in Pennsylvania, and real estate. Baum grew up on his parents’ expansive estate called Rose Lawn, which he fondly recalled as a sort of paradise. Rose Lawn was located in Mattydale, New York. Frank was a sickly, dreamy child, tutored at home with his siblings. From the age of 12, he spent two miserable years at Peekskill Military Academy but, after being severely disciplined for daydreaming, he had a possibly psychogenic heart attack and was allowed to return home.

Baum started writing early in life, possibly prompted by his father buying him a cheap printing press. He had always been close to his younger brother Henry (Harry) Clay Baum, who helped in the production of The Rose Lawn Home Journal. The brothers published several issues of the journal, including advertisements from local businesses, which they gave to family and friends for free. By the age of 17, Baum established a second amateur journal called The Stamp Collector, printed an 11-page pamphlet called Baum’s Complete Stamp Dealers’ Directory, and started a stamp dealership with friends.

At 20, Baum took on the national craze of breeding fancy poultry. He specialized in raising the Hamburg chicken. In March 1880, he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record, and in 1886, when Baum was 30 years old, his first book was published: The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.

Baum had a flair for being the spotlight of fun in the household, including during times of financial difficulties. His selling of fireworks made the Fourth of July memorable. His skyrockets, Roman candles, and fireworks filled the sky, while many people around the neighborhood would gather in front of the house to watch the displays. Christmas was even more festive. Baum dressed as Santa Claus for the family. His father would place the Christmas tree behind a curtain in the front parlor so that Baum could talk to everyone while he decorated the tree without people managing to see him. He maintained this tradition all his life.

L. Frank Baum served for two years as a cadet at the Peekskill Military School, which overlooked the Hudson. He was about 12 years old in this 1868 photograph.

L. Frank Baum’s Career

Theatre

Baum embarked on his lifetime infatuation—and wavering financial success—with the theatre. A local theatrical company duped him into replenishing their stock of costumes on the promise of leading roles coming his way. Disillusioned, Baum left the theatre—temporarily—and went to work as a clerk in his brother-in-law’s dry goods company in Syracuse. This experience may have influenced his story “The Suicide of Kiaros”, first published in the literary journal The White Elephant. A fellow clerk one day had been found locked in a storeroom dead, probably from suicide.

Baum could never stay away long from the stage. He performed in plays under the stage names of Louis F. Baum and George Brooks. In 1880, his father built him a theatre in Richburg, New York, and Baum set about writing plays and gathering a company to act in them. The Maid of Arran proved a modest success, a melodrama with songs based on William Black’s novel A Princess of Thule. Baum wrote the play and composed songs for it (making it a prototypical musical, as its songs relate to the narrative), and acted in the leading role. His aunt Katharine Gray played his character’s aunt. She was the founder of Syracuse Oratory School, and Baum advertised his services in her catalogue to teach theatre, including stage business, playwriting, directing, translating (French, German, and Italian), revision, and operettas.

On November 9, 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, a daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a famous women’s suffrage and feminist activist. While Baum was touring with The Maid of Arran, the theatre in Richburg caught fire during a production of Baum’s ironically titled parlour drama Matches, destroying the theatre as well as the only known copies of many of Baum’s scripts, including Matches, as well as costumes.

The South Dakota Years

In July 1888, Baum and his wife moved to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory where he opened a store called “Baum’s Bazaar”. His habit of giving out wares on credit led to the eventual bankrupting of the store, so Baum turned to editing the local newspaper The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer where he wrote the column Our Landlady. Following the death of Sitting Bull at the hands of Indian agency police, Baum urged the wholesale extermination of all America’s native peoples in a column that he wrote on December 20, 1890. He wrote:

“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth”.

Baum’s description of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is based on his experiences in drought-ridden South Dakota. During much of this time, Matilda Joslyn Gage was living in the Baum household. While Baum was in South Dakota, he sang in a quartet which included James Kyle, who became one of the first Populist (People’s Party) Senators in the U.S.

Writing

Baum’s newspaper failed in 1891, and he, Maud, and their four sons moved to the Humboldt Park section of Chicago, where Baum took a job reporting for the Evening Post. Beginning in 1897, he founded and edited a magazine called The Show Window, later known as the Merchants Record and Show Window, which focused on store window displays, retail strategies and visual merchandising. The major department stores of the time created elaborate Christmas time fantasies, using clockwork mechanisms that made people and animals appear to move. The former Show Window magazine is still currently in operation, now known as VMSD magazine (visual merchandising + store design), based in Cincinnati. In 1900, Baum published a book about window displays in which he stressed the importance of mannequins in drawing customers. He also had to work as a travelling salesman.

In 1897, he wrote and published Mother Goose in Prose, a collection of Mother Goose rhymes written as prose stories and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. Mother Goose was a moderate success and allowed Baum to quit his sales job (which had had a negative impact on his health). In 1899, Baum partnered with illustrator W. W. Denslow to publish Father Goose, His Book, a collection of nonsense poetry. The book was a success, becoming the best-selling children’s book of the year.

In 1897 Mother Goose by L. Frank Baum and Maxfield Parrish was used to promote a breakfast cereal (part 1 of 12 as a free premium).

Promotional Poster for Popular Books For Children, circa 1901.

W. W. Denslow in 1900.

The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

In 1900, Baum and Denslow (with whom he shared the copyright) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical acclaim and financial success. The book was the best-selling children’s book for two years after its initial publication. Baum went on to write thirteen more novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz.

The Wizard Of Oz: Fred R. Hamlin’s Musical Extravaganza

Two years after Wizard‘s publication, Baum and Denslow teamed up with composer Paul Tietjens and director Julian Mitchell to produce a musical stage version of the book under Fred R. Hamlin. Baum and Tietjens had worked on a musical of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1901 and based closely upon the book, but it was rejected. This stage version opened in Chicago in 1902 (the first to use the shortened title, The Wizard of Oz), then ran on Broadway for 293 stage nights from January to October 1903. It returned to Broadway in 1904, where it played from March to May and again from November to December. It successfully toured the United States with much of the same cast, as was done in those days, until 1911, and then became available for amateur use. The stage version starred Anna Laughlin as Dorothy Gale, alongside David C. Montgomery and Fred Stone as the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow respectively, which shot the pair to instant fame.

The stage version differed quite a bit from the book and was aimed primarily at adults. Toto was replaced with Imogene the Cow, and Tryxie Tryfle (a waitress) and Pastoria (a streetcar operator) were added as fellow cyclone victims. The Wicked Witch of the West was eliminated entirely in the script, and the plot became about how the four friends were allied with the usurping Wizard and were hunted as traitors to Pastoria II, the rightful King of Oz. It is unclear how much control or influence Baum had on the script; it appears that many of the changes were written by Baum against his wishes due to contractual requirements with Hamlin. Jokes in the script, mostly written by Glen MacDonough, called for explicit references to President Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Mark Hanna, Rev. Andrew Danquer, and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Although the use of the script was rather free-form, the line about Hanna was ordered dropped as soon as Hamlin got word of his death in 1904.

Beginning with the success of the stage version, most subsequent versions of the story, including newer editions of the novel, have been titled The Wizard of Oz, rather than using the full, original title. In more recent years, restoring the full title has become increasingly common, particularly to distinguish the novel from the Hollywood film.

Baum wrote a new Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, with a view to making it into a stage production, which was titled The Woggle-Bug, but Montgomery and Stone baulked at appearing when the original was still running. The Scarecrow and Tin Woodman were then omitted from this adaptation, which was seen as a self-rip-off by critics and proved to be a major flop before it could reach Broadway. He also worked for years on a musical version of Ozma of Oz, which eventually became The Tik-Tok Man of Oz. This did fairly well in Los Angeles, but not well enough to convince producer Oliver Morosco to mount a production in New York. He also began a stage version of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, but this was ultimately realized as a film.

A 1903 poster of Dave Montgomery as the Tin Man in Fred R. Hamlin’s musical stage version of The Wizard Of Oz.

Later Life And Work

With the success of Wizard on page and stage, Baum and Denslow hoped for further success and published Dot and Tot of Merryland in 1901. The book was one of Baum’s weakest, and its failure further strained his faltering relationship with Denslow. It was their last collaboration. Baum worked primarily with John R. Neill on his fantasy work beginning in 1904, but Baum met Neill a few times (all before he moved to California) and often found Neill’s art not humorous enough for his liking. He was particularly offended when Neill published The Oz Toy Book: Cut-outs for the Kiddies without authorization.

Baum reportedly designed the chandeliers in the Crown Room of the Hotel del Coronado; however, that attribution has yet to be corroborated. Several times during the development of the Oz series, Baum declared that he had written his last Oz book and devoted himself to other works of fantasy fiction based in other magical lands, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Queen Zixi of Ix. However, he returned to the series each time, persuaded by popular demand, letters from children, and the failure of his new books. Even so, his other works remained very popular after his death, with The Master Key appearing on St. Nicholas Magazine’s survey of readers’ favourite books well into the 1920s.

In 1905, Baum declared plans for an Oz amusement park. In an interview, he mentioned buying “Pedloe Island” off the coast of California to turn it into an Oz park. However, there is no evidence that he purchased such an island, and no one has ever been able to find any island whose name even resembles Pedloe in that area. Nevertheless, Baum stated to the press that he had discovered a Pedloe Island off the coast of California and that he had purchased it to be “the Marvelous Land of Oz,” intending it to be “a fairy paradise for children.” Eleven-year-old Dorothy Talbot of San Francisco was reported to be ascendant to the throne on March 1, 1906, when the Palace of Oz was expected to be completed. Baum planned to live on the island, with administrative duties handled by the princess and her all-child advisers. Plans included statues of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, Jack Pumpkinhead, and H.M. Woggle-Bug, T.E. Baum abandoned his Oz park project after the failure of The Woggle-Bug, which was playing at the Garrick Theatre in 1905.

Because of his lifelong love of theatre, he financed elaborate musicals, often to his financial detriment. One of Baum’s worst financial endeavours was his The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908), which combined a slideshow, film, and live actors with a lecture by Baum as if he were giving a travelogue to Oz. However, Baum ran into trouble and could not pay his debts to the company that produced the films. He did not get back to a stable financial situation for several years, after he sold the royalty rights to many of his earlier works, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This resulted in the M.A. Donahue Company publishing cheap editions of his early works with advertising which purported that Baum’s newer output was inferior to the less expensive books that they were releasing. He claimed bankruptcy in August 1911. However, Baum had shrewdly transferred most of his property into Maud’s name, except for his clothing, his typewriter, and his library (mostly of children’s books, such as the fairy tales of Andrew Lang, whose portrait he kept in his study)—all of which, he successfully argued, was essential to his occupation. Maud handled the finances anyway, and thus Baum lost much less than he could have.

Read more about Later Life And Work here.

L. Frank Baum and characters in The Fairylogue and Radio Plays in 1908.

Death

On May 5, 1919, Baum suffered a stroke, slipped into a coma and died the following day, at the age of 62. His last words were spoken to his wife during a brief period of lucidity: “Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.” He was buried in Glendale’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.

His final Oz book, Glinda of Oz, was published on July 10, 1920, a year after his death. The Oz series was continued long after his death by other authors, notably Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote an additional twenty-one Oz books.

Frank L. Baum’s grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, California in 2011.

Blog Posts

Books: The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land Of Oz.

Books: The Woggle-Bug Book.

Books: Little Wizard Stories Of Oz.

Books: Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Books: Little Wizard Stories Of Oz By L. Frank Baum.

Notes And Links

The image above of L. Frank Baum shown at the top of this page is copyright of George Steckel.

The image above of L. Frank Baum as a cadet at the Peekskill Military School is copyright unknown.

The image above of Mother Goose by L. Frank Baum and Maxfield Parrish is copyright unknown.

The image above of the Promotional Poster for Popular Books For Children, circa 1901 is copyright unknown.

The image above of W. W. Denslow in 1900 is copyright unknown.

The image above of a 1903 poster of Dave Montgomery as the Tin Man in Fred R. Hamlin’s musical stage version of The Wizard Of Oz is copyright of U.S. Lithograph Co.

All the above images are in the Public Domain via Wikipedia.

The image above of Frank L. Baum’s grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, California in 2011 is copyright of Wikipedia user Meribona. It comes with a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Creative Commons – Official website. They offer better sharing, advancing universal access to knowledge and culture, and fostering creativity, innovation, and collaboration.

The Wonderful Wiki of Oz – Official website. A wonderful and welcoming encyclopedia of all things Oz that anyone can edit or contribute Oz-related information and Oz facts to enjoy.

The Oz Archive on Facebook – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Twitter – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on Instagram – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

The Oz Archive on TikTok – Archiving and celebrating the legacy of Oz.

Books: The Oz Series By L. Frank Baum

Below are all of the fourteen fantasy books in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum via Project Gutenberg for you to download for FREE and a brief description of each book.

They come in PDF format and if you don’t have a PDF reader you can download one from here.

Also shown is anything related to the Oz series which was written when Baum was alive. I am not including anything to do with Oz written after his death but you can find out about all that at the bottom of this page.

The Land Of Oz

The Land of Oz is a magical country first introduced in the 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow.

Oz consists of four vast quadrants, the Gillikin Country in the north, Quadling Country in the south, Munchkin Country in the east, and Winkie Country in the west. Each province has its own ruler, but the realm itself has always been ruled by a single monarch. According to The Marvelous Land of Oz, this monarch is Princess Ozma.

Originally, Baum did not intend for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to have any sequels, but it achieved greater popularity than any of the other fairylands he created, including the land of Merryland in Baum’s children’s novel Dot and Tot in Merryland, written a year later. Due to Oz’s worldwide success, Baum decided to return to it four years after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. For the next two decades, he described and expanded upon the land in the Oz Books, a series that introduced many fictional characters and creatures. Baum intended to end the series with the sixth Oz book The Emerald City of Oz (1910), in which Oz is forever sealed off and made invisible to the outside world, but this did not sit well with fans, and he quickly abandoned the idea, writing eight more successful Oz books, and even naming himself the “Royal Historian of Oz.”

In all, Baum wrote fourteen best-selling children’s books about Oz and its enchanted inhabitants, as well as a spin-off series of six early readers. After his death in 1919, author Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrator John R. Neill (who had previously collaborated with Baum on his Oz books) and several other writers and artists continued the series. There are now over 50 novels based upon Baum’s original Oz saga.

Baum characterized Oz as a real place, unlike MGM’s 1939 musical movie adaptation, which presents it as a dream of lead character Dorothy Gale. According to the Oz books, it is a hidden fairyland cut off from the rest of the world by the Deadly Desert.

A shorthand reference for a person living in Oz is “Ozite”. The term appears in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, and The Emerald City of Oz. Elsewhere in the books, “Ozmie” is also used. In the animated 1974 semi-sequel to the MGM film, Journey Back to Oz, “Ozonian” is in the script. The term “Ozian” appears in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of the MGM movie and in the work Wicked. “Ozmite” was used in Reilly & Lee marketing in the 1920s, a fact which has suggested to some critics that “Ozmie” may have been a typographical error.

Read lots more about the Land Of Oz in great detail including its characteristics, geography, history, animals, races, magic, characters etc. by clicking here.

The Original Oz Books By L. Frank Baum

The Oz books form a book series that begins with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and relates the fictional history of the Land of Oz. All of Baum’s books are in the public domain in the United States. In his Oz books, Baum created the illusion that characters such as Dorothy and Princess Ozma relayed their adventures in Oz to Baum themselves, by means of a wireless telegraph.

Book One: The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz (1900)

A little farm girl named Dorothy and her pet dog, Toto, get swept away into the Land of Oz by a Kansas cyclone. Upon her arrival, she is hailed as a sorceress, liberates a living Scarecrow, meets a man made entirely of tin, and a Cowardly Lion. But all Dorothy really wants to know is how she can return home. The ruler of Oz, the great Wizard, who resides in an Emerald City, may be the only one powerful enough to help her.

This was also reprinted by various publishers under the names The New Wizard of Oz and The Wizard of Oz with occasional minor changes in the text. It was originally written as a one-shot book.

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Book Two: The Marvelous Land Of Oz (1904)

A little boy, Tip, escapes from his evil guardian, the witch Mombi, with the help of a walking wooden figure with a jack-o’-lantern head named Jack Pumpkinhead (brought to life with the magic Powder of Life Tip stole from Mombi), as well as a living Sawhorse (created from the same powder). Tip ends up on an adventure with the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman to help Scarecrow recapture his throne from General Jinjur’s army of girls.

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Book Three: Ozma Of Oz (1907)

While travelling to Australia with her Uncle Henry, Dorothy is swept overboard with a hen named Billina. They land in Ev, a country across the desert from Oz, where they encounter the wheelers and make a new friend, the mechanical man Tik-Tok. They meet Princess Ozma, who is in Ev to attempt to save Ev’s royal family from the evil Nome King, and finally return to Oz.

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Book Four: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz (1908)

On her way back from Australia, Dorothy visits her cousin, Zeb, in California. They are soon swallowed up by an earthquake, along with Zeb’s horse Jim and Dorothy’s cat Eureka. The group soon meets up with the Wizard and all travel underground back to Oz.

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Book Five: The Road To Oz (1909)

Dorothy meets the Shaggy Man, and while trying to find the road to Butterfield, they get lost on an enchanted road. As they travel they meet the rainbow’s daughter, Polychrome, and a little boy, Button-Bright. They have all sorts of strange adventures on the way to Oz.

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Book Six: The Emerald City Of Oz (1910)

Dorothy Gale and her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em come to live in Oz permanently. While they tour through the Quadling Country, the Nome King is tunnelling beneath the desert to invade Oz.

This was originally intended to be the last book in the series.

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Book Seven: The Patchwork Girl Of Oz (1913)

A Munchkin boy named Ojo must find a cure to free his Uncle Nunkie from a magical spell that has turned him into a statue. With the help of Scraps, an anthropomorphic patchwork doll, Ojo journeys through Oz to save his uncle.

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Book Eight: Tik-Tok Of Oz (1914)

Betsy Bobbin, a girl from Oklahoma, is shipwrecked with her mule, Hank, in the Rose Kingdom of Oz. She meets the Shaggy Man there and the two try to rescue the Shaggy Man’s brother from the Nome King.

This book is partly based upon Baum’s stage musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which was in turn based on Ozma of Oz.

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Book Nine: The Scarecrow Of Oz (1915)

Cap’n Bill and Trot journey to Oz and, with the help of the Scarecrow, the former ruler of Oz, overthrow the villainous King Krewl of Jinxland.

Cap’n Bill and Trot had previously appeared in two other novels by Baum, The Sea Fairies and Sky Island. Based in part upon the 1914 silent film, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz. This was allegedly L. Frank Baum’s personal favourite Oz book.

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Book Ten: Rinkitink In Oz (1916)

Young Prince Inga of Pingaree, aided by King Rinkitink, three powerful magical pearls, and a goat, attempts to rescue Inga’s parents and their subjects from marauding warriors who have laid waste to Pingaree and enslaved its people.

Baum originally wrote this book as a non-Oz book which he titled King Rinkitink.

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Book Eleven: The Lost Princess Of Oz (1917)

When Princess Ozma mysteriously disappears, four search parties are sent out, one for each of Oz’s four countries. Most of the book covers Dorothy and the Wizard’s efforts to find her. Meanwhile, Cayke the Cookie Chef discovers that her magic dishpan (on which she bakes her famous cookies) has been stolen. Along with the Frogman, they leave their mountain in Winkie Country to find the pan.

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Book Twelve: The Tin Woodman Of Oz (1918)

The Tin Woodman, whose real name is Nick Chopper, sets out to find the Munchkin Girl he had courted before he became a tin man. He and his party (the Scarecrow and a new character who is called Woot the Wanderer) have numerous adventures on this quest. They are transformed into animals by a hostile giantess, and they meet another live tin man, Captain Fyter, as well as a Frankenstein monster-like creature, Chopfyt, made from their combined fleshly parts by the tinsmith Ku-Klip.

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Book Thirteen: The Magic Of Oz (1919)

Ruggedo, former Nome King, tries to conquer Oz again with the help of a Munchkin boy, Kiki Aru. Meanwhile, it is also Ozma’s birthday, and all of Oz’s citizens are searching for the most unusual present for the little princess.

This was published a month after Baum’s death.

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Book Fourteen: Glinda Of Oz (1920)

Dorothy, Ozma and Glinda try to stop a war in the Gillikin Country.

This was Baum’s last Oz book, and it was published posthumously. This book contains a dark scene (in the house of Red Reera), most likely due to Baum’s failing health. Many other Oz books have been released since the publication of Glinda of Oz, but none of them was written by Baum.

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Related To The Oz Series

The following are related to the Oz series of books written during the life of L. Frank Baum.

Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land Of Oz (1904 -1905)

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The Woggle-Bug Book (1905)

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Little Wizard Stories Of Oz (1913)

Read about it here.

The Littlest Giant: An Oz Story

I can’t find a cover for this or much more information so there is no separate page for it.

The Littlest Giant: An Oz Story is a short story written by Baum in 1917 and illustrated by Bill Eubank. It was discovered after his death with the first page missing. It was published in The Baum Bugle in 1975. It was a tale about a magic dart, nominally set in the Gillikin Country but otherwise, it made no reference to Oz.

To read other information relating to the Oz series including subsequent Oz books by other writers etc. after Baums death click here.

The above descriptions were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

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