The birth of children’s novel which became an American cultural icon
On May 17, 1900, at a printers Chicago, a new children’s fantasy novel began rolling off the press.
Author L Frank Baum assembled the pages by hand, to make the first ever copy of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, which he gave to his sister.
Baum’s novel is the most influential work in American children’s fiction – giving the world key characters and ideas such as the Yellow Brick Road, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wicked Witch of the West.
In the novel – which was illustrated by fellow Chicago newspaperman WW Denslow, a Kansas farm girl named Dorothy ends up in the magical Land of Oz after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their home by a cyclone.
Upon her arrival in Oz, she learns she cannot return home until she has destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West.
The ground-breaking success of both the original 1900 novel and the 1902 musical prompted Baum to write 13 additional Oz books which serve as official sequels to the first story.
More than a century later, the book is one of the bestknown stories in American literature, and the Library of Congress has declared the work to be “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairy tale.”
Born and raised in upstate New York, Baum moved west after an unsuccessful stint as a theatre producer and playwright. He and his wife opened a store in South Dakota and he edited and published a newspaper. They then moved to
Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter.
Many of the characters and ideas in the novel are drawn from Baum’s life.
Dorothy is believed to have been partly based on Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a prominent women’s rights activist, and named after his niece, Dorothy Louise Gage, who died aged five months.
As a child, Baum frequently had nightmares of a scarecrow pursuing him across a field. Decades later he used those dreams to create the character The Scarecrow.
Meanwhile the Tin Woodman was inspired by shop window displays Baum had created for his South Dakota store.
The first edition had a printing run of 10,000 copies, with the publishers hoping to sell around 250,000 in total. In the event,
Baum’s novel went on to sell well over three million, spawning first a musical play, then in 1939, a visually stunning film, The Wizard of Oz.
The film is celebrated for its use of Technicolor, fantasy storytelling, musical score, and memorable characters. It was a critical success and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture – an award it lost to another
MGM production, Gone With The Wind, but won Best Original Song for “Over the Rainbow” and Best Original Score; along with an Academy Juvenile Award for Judy Garland,who played Dorothy.
But it failed to make a profit for MGM until its 1949 re-release, earning only $3 million on a $2.7 million budget, making it MGM’S most expensive production at the time.
Baum never got to see the film. In May 1919 he suffered a stroke, slipped into a coma and died the following day.
Nor did Denslow, whose illustrations did so much to make the original book a hit. But royalties from the print and stage versions were sufficient to allow him to purchase Bluck’s Island, Bermuda, and crown himself King Denslow I.