The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Written By Frank Baum
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Frank Baum
$19.99
Home was never this far — or this close.
On a gray Kansas farm, a cyclone tears Dorothy Gale and her small dog Toto out of the everyday and drops them somewhere else entirely: a country of Munchkins, talking animals, and witches both good and wicked. Dorothy’s landing kills the Wicked Witch of the East, and the silver shoes left behind mark her (whether she wants it or not) as someone with power she doesn’t yet understand.
To get home, she is told, she must reach the Emerald City and petition the Wizard who rules it. The road there — famously paved with yellow bricks — gathers companions, each one convinced of his own lack: the Scarecrow needs a brain, the Tin Woodman a heart, and the Lion courage. Each hopes the Wizard can supply what he’s missing. Between them and the city stand fatal poppy fields, fighting trees, and the Wicked Witch of the West, who wants Dorothy’s shoes badly enough to hunt her for them.
What the travelers find in Oz — and in the Wizard himself — reframes the whole journey. Baum’s tale, published in 1900, became known as the first great American fairy tale precisely because it refused the old-world trappings of European fantasy: no princes, no ancient curses, just a resourceful girl and a magic that turns out to live closer to home than anyone expected.
“There is no place like home.”
About the Author
- Frank Baum
Lyman Frank Baum was a newspaperman, playwright, and failed shopkeeper before he became, almost by accident, America’s first major writer of fantasy for children. He drafted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Chicago in the late 1890s, reportedly telling the story aloud to his own children and their friends before he ever wrote it down.
Baum wanted to build a fairy tale with the wonder of the old European tradition but without its violence and moralizing. The book’s success surprised its publishers and launched a series; Baum wrote thirteen further Oz novels before his death in 1919, though none displaced the first in the public imagination.
More than a century later, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz remains a foundational text of American children’s literature — adapted for both stage and screen, and absorbed into the culture so completely that its images function as shorthand even for those who’ve never read the original classic.
