The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

About this book

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is L. Frank Baum’s story of a Kansas farm girl carried by a cyclone to a strange country, where she sets out for the Emerald City to ask a wizard to send her home. It was published in Chicago in 1900 and was the best-selling children’s book in the United States for the next two years. Baum went on to write thirteen more Oz books, and other writers continued the series after his death.

The book has lasted on its own merits, though the 1939 film has shaped how most people picture it. Baum set out, as he explained in his introduction, to write a new kind of fairy tale for American children, keeping the wonders of the old European stories and leaving out their moralizing and their nightmares. The result is a fast, plain-spoken adventure with a practical heroine and three companions whose supposed deficiencies the reader can see are imaginary.

The story

Dorothy lives with her aunt and uncle on a gray Kansas farm. A cyclone lifts the house with Dorothy and her dog Toto inside and sets it down in the land of the Munchkins, on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. The grateful Munchkins and the Good Witch of the North give Dorothy the dead witch’s silver shoes and advise her to follow the road of yellow brick to the Emerald City, where the great Wizard Oz may be able to send her home.

On the way she meets a Scarecrow who wants brains, a Tin Woodman who wants a heart, and a Lion who wants courage, and the four travel together. The Wizard agrees to help them only if they first kill the Wicked Witch of the West, which sends them into the western country and into the power of the witch, her wolves, her crows, and her winged monkeys.

Themes and historical context

Baum had tried many careers (actor, shopkeeper, newspaper editor in South Dakota, traveling salesman) before finding success as a children’s author in Chicago in the late 1890s. The Kansas of the novel, flat and drought-colored, draws on his years on the Great Plains, and Oz, with its bright colors and small self-governing peoples, is its opposite.

The book’s most discussed theme is the gap between what the companions believe they lack and what they actually do. The Scarecrow has the best ideas, the Tin Woodman is the most tender-hearted, and the Lion is the first into danger, long before the Wizard gives them tokens of what they already have. The Wizard himself, when finally reached, turns out to be something other than advertised, and the way Baum handles that discovery, with humor rather than outrage, sets the tone of the series.

Since the 1960s some readers have proposed that the book is an allegory of American monetary politics in the 1890s, with the silver shoes and the yellow brick road standing for the silver and gold standards. There is no evidence that Baum intended this, and most scholars treat the reading as a teaching device rather than a key to the book.

Who should read it

At around 40,000 words in twenty-four short chapters, it is quick to read and straightforward in language. Young readers can manage it alone; parents reading aloud will find each chapter is a natural stopping point. Adults coming from the film should expect differences: the shoes are silver, there is no dream, and the second half of the book contains episodes the film omits. The book stands on its own and can be read without any of the sequels.