L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz

Where It All Began

In 1900, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (often shortened to The Wizard of Oz) was published. It told the story of a Kansas farm girl, Dorothy, and how she was transported by a tornado to the land of Oz, a fantasy land populated with wonderful, strange and often magical creatures.

Delightfully illustrated by artist W.W. Denslow, the book spawned another thirteen books by Baum, and another nineteen books after his death by another author, Ruth Plumly Thompson, brought in to continue the 'franchise'.

The Musical Movie

The Oz books are perhaps best known for the movie-musical that was inspired by the first; the MGM movie The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale.

The Canonical Oz

In the original book, Dorothy really is carried by a tornado to Oz, and transported back by her silver slippers. (The movie changed the slippers to ruby to better show off their new color film processes.) The 'wrapper' that is was all a dream was a Hollywood invention - L. Frank Baum's original was unabashedly magical and felt no need to apologize or offer a 'rational' explanation.

The story is the same, however - the naive but brave farm girl finds herself in a strange land. Making friends and allies as she goes, she tries to find a way back to her home. Children reading this novel - or watching the Hollywood version - have often wondered why she was so eager to return to what was an admittedly drab life on the hardscrabble plains of the American Midwest. But as Dorothy herself would tell you, "There's no place like home."

Finding that the 'Wizard', whom she was counting on to get her home, is as much an American exile, and totally without magical abilities, as she is, Dorothy has to use the magic in her slippers, of which she was unaware, to return home, to find her astonished relatives have rebuilt their house and mourned her as dead.

Further Adventures in Oz

The sequels to the Wizard are as delightful as the original book. The second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz (often referred to as simply The Land of Oz), is notable in that there are no Americans in sight. The main character is a boy named Tip, who discovers, after meeting a plethora of amusing and/or frightening characters, that he is really a girl disguised as a boy through magic and is Ozma the rightful ruler of Oz.

L. Frank Baum doesn't address the most fascinating feature of this concept, the magical gender switch, in any meaningful way. It is apparently no trauma to Tip to suddenly become a girl again. Readers over the age of, say, seven are forced to wonder what the ramifications of the sudden switch might be. How does Tip/Ozma deal with the plumbing aspects alone? I often thought that suddenly having to sit to perform functions that one could hitherto have performed standing must have caused some psychological issues, but if there are any, Baum leaves them unaddressed.

Dorothy meets Ozma in the third book in the series, Ozma of Oz, as she is swept off an ocean liner and back into the magical realms.

Oz Fandom

The Baum universe of Oz has a fandom as fanatical as any, with conventions, scholarly treatises, and collectors of Oziania.