The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

by L. Frank Baum

Overview

Excerpt:
Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016774220
Publisher:	Hannah Stuart
Publication date:	03/30/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	92
File size:	290 KB

About the Author

Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow, Aunt Em -- where would our national psyche be without The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? L. Frank Baum, who created a story with an indelible, sometimes haunting impression on so many people, led a life that had a fairy-tale quality of its own.

Baum was born in 1856 to a family that had made a fortune in the oil business. Because he had a heart condition, his parents arranged for him to be tutored privately at the family�s Syracuse estate, �Roselawn.� As an adult, though, Baum flourished and failed at a dizzying variety of ventures, from writing plays to a stint with his family�s medicinal oil business (where he produced a potion called �Baum�s Castorine�), to managing a general store, to editing the Aberdeen Pioneer in Aberdeen, South Dakota. In 1897, following his mother-in-law�s advice, Baum wrote down the stories that he told his children. The firm of Way & Williams published the stories under the title Mother Goose in Prose, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and Baum�s career as a writer was launched.

With the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, Baum gained instant success. The book, lavishly produced and featuring voluptuous illustrations by William Wallace Denslow, was the bestselling children�s book of the year. It also set a new standard for children�s literature. As a commentator for the September 8, 1900 New York Times described it, �The crudeness that was characteristic of the oldtime publications...would now be enough to cause the modern child to yell with rage and vigor...� The reviewer praised the book�s sheer entertainment value (its �bright and joyous atmosphere�) and likened it to The Story of the Three Bears for its enduring value. As the film industry emerged in the following years, few books were as manifestly destined for adaptation, and although it took almost four decades for a movie studio to translate Baum�s vision to film, the 1939 film did for the movies what Baum�s book had done for children�s literature: that is, raised the imaginative and technical bar higher than it had been before.

The loss of parents, the inevitable voyage toward independence, the yearning for home -- in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum touched upon a child�s primal experiences while providing a rousing story of adventure. As his health declined, Baum continued the series with 14 more Oz books (his publisher commissioned more by other authors after his death), but none had quite the effect on the reading public that the first one did. Baum died from complications of a stroke in 1919.

Date of Birth:

May 15, 1856

Date of Death:

May 6, 1919

Place of Birth:

Chittenango, New York

Place of Death:

Hollywood, California

Education:

Attended Peekskill Military Academy and Syracuse Classical School