The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum #Ozathon24

Title: The Wizard of Oz
Author: L. Frank Baum
Illustrator: W.W. Denslow
Publication: Reilly & Lee Co., hardcover, originally published in 1900
Genre: Juvenile fantasy/series

Description: Dorothy is a little girl who lives in Kansas, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. When a cyclone hits, Dorothy and her dog Toto don’t move quickly enough to the cellar: the house is sucked into the center of the cyclone and they are transported to a country of marvelous beauty and color, quite different from the gray prairie she knows. Dorothy is welcomed by its inhabitants but is dismayed to be told she killed the wicked Witch of the East when her house landed. The Good Witch of the North tells Dorothy to take the deceased Witch’s silver shoes and seek help returning to Kansas from Oz, the Great Wizard who lives in the Emerald City. She advises Dorothy to follow a road paved with yellow brick to get there.

On the way, Dorothy befriends a Scarecrow who wants a brain, a Tin Woodman who yearns for a heart, and a cowardly Lion who needs courage. They decide to accompany her to the Emerald City to ask the wizard to help them too. The four companions experience various challenges on their journey, including nearly succumbing to deadly poppy fumes, but when they finally are in the presence of the Great Oz, he refuses to help them unless they kill the Wicked Witch of the West! Dorothy is horrified and explains the earlier incident was an accident but Oz does not care; he says, “You killed the Witch of the East and you wear the silver shoes, which bears a powerful charm. There is now but one Wicked Witch left in all the land, and when you can tell me she is dead I will send you back to Kansas – but not before.” Because they have no choice, they take on the quest.

My Impression: Baum (1856-1919) was an entrepreneur, always hustling to make a living, but had not been successful until he took his mother-in-law’s advice and turned some of the stories he told children about a girl named Dorothy into a book. One possibly apocryphal anecdote refers to the origins of the word Oz:  Baum says he glanced at his filing cabinet, noticed that the last drawer was labeled O-Z, and went with it, but scholars are unconvinced, as this story surfaced several years after the book was published.

The book was first published as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, after much debate (one working title was From Kansas to Fairyland).  The response was immediately favorable.  Reviewers liked the juxtaposition of American qualities – self-reliance and confidence exhibited by Dorothy – and fantasy, which made the book appeal to adults and children. Sales were strong from the beginning, with 37,672 copies sold in the first fifteen months. My own great-grandfather, who had seven children and no money to spare, brought home each Oz book as they were published in the early 20th century and read them to his children (we even have a few shreds of first editions but these books were loved and read too much to survive). While Dorothy wants to return home and her companions seek to improve themselves, as a collaborative unit they are stronger than their parts and work together to carry out their quest: first to get to the Emerald City and then to take on the Wicked Witch of the West. Katherine Rogers, Baum’s biographer points out that unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Dorothy has agency: she makes sense of the world she has been tossed into, acquires friends and develops relationships, takes action, speaks candidly, and is ultimately successful (L. Frank Baum at 93).

The collaboration between Baum and illustrator William Wallace Denslow began in 1897 in Chicago when the two men met and became friends. Denslow was already a successful artist and provided illustrations for some minor literary projects of Baum’s before they decided to collaborate on a book about Mother Goose’s husband that consisted of comic verses by Baum and pictures provided by Denslow that were “stylish and humorous. Moreover, he did not merely draw illustrations for the verses; he arranged pictures, color, and text to make an artistically unified page, so that the book, Father Goose, ‘resembled a series of art posters bound together’” (Rogers at 67). As Baum started working on Oz, he showed Denslow what he had written and Denslow began to sketch the characters. As with Father Goose, Denslow used color, especially contrasting gray Kansas and the resplendent colors in Oz, and he incorporated pictures into the text, which further brought the story to life. He was especially praised for drawing animals such as the Cowardly Lion with human expressions (Rogers 85-87).

These days, more people have seen the movie of The Wizard of Oz than have read the book (the first time I saw it on TV, someone told me the movie starts off in black and white, then becomes technicolor when Dorothy reaches Oz; alas, we had an old television and the only colors it could do were green and purple; quite the disappointment). The two most significant differences in the movie are that Dorothy was meant to be a child, much younger than 15-year-old Judy Garland, and in the movie, the entire adventure turns out to have been a dream. I don’t know about you, but I hate when stories end that way (see Alice in Wonderland, The Box of Delights)! Few know that Dorothy’s adventures continued as Baum went on to write 13 more books in the series. Some are definitely better than others, as you will see if you join #Ozathon24 with Lory from Entering the Enchanted Castle. If you are not in the mood to read all or any, you can just follow along.

This first book was read to me before I could read and Dorothy continued to be a favorite of mine for years. I read and reread all Oz books Baum wrote, and once even read those by Ruth Plumly Thompson (who continued the series after Baum died) when I encountered them in a Martha’s Vineyard library. I tried out for a part in a children’s theater production when I was about 9: I got the part of Hank, a hired man, who is not in the book but is the movie’s basis for the Scarecrow:

“Sometimes, Dorothy, you act like you don’t have any brains at all!”

“I have so got brains, Hank!”

“Then why don’t you use them?”

In addition to my two memorable lines, I played a Munchkin, a Winged Bat (I told the director, Miss Bonnie, that they were actually monkeys not bats but she was focused on the big picture, putting on a show rather than literary accuracy), and a resident of Emerald City. It was fun and the girl who played Dorothy went on to star in the first season of Zoom, long before the word meant something else. My aunt made me a Dorothy costume for Halloween, which I wore annually until it no longer fit, and my little brother obliged as Toto for a year or two, then graduated to the Cowardly Lion.

Source: Family copy