The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a 1900 children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow.[1] It is the first novel in the Oz series of books. 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.[2] Upon her arrival in the magical world of Oz, she learns she cannot return home until she has destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West.[3]
For the 1939 film, see The Wizard of Oz. For other uses, see The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (disambiguation).Author
United States
English
May 17, 1900
The book was first published in the United States in May 1900 by the George M. Hill Company.[4] In January 1901, the publishing company completed printing the first edition, a total of 10,000 copies, which quickly sold out.[4] It had sold three million copies by the time it entered the public domain in 1956. It was often reprinted under the title The Wizard of Oz, which is the title of the successful 1902 Broadway musical adaptation as well as the 1939 live-action film.[5][6]
The ground-breaking success of both the original 1900 novel and the 1902 musical prompted Baum to write thirteen additional Oz books which serve as official sequels to the first story. Over a century later, the book is one of the best-known stories in American literature, and the Library of Congress has declared the work to be "America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale."[7]
Editions
After George M. Hill's bankruptcy in 1902, copyright in the book passed to the Bowen-Merrill Company of Indianapolis.[9] The company published most of Baum's other books from 1901 to 1903 (Father Goose, His Book (reprint), The Magical Monarch of Mo (reprint), American Fairy Tales (reprint), Dot and Tot of Merryland (reprint), The Master Key, The Army Alphabet, The Navy Alphabet, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Enchanted Island of Yew, The Songs of Father Goose) initially under the title The New Wizard of Oz. The word "New" was quickly dropped in subsequent printings, leaving the now-familiar shortened title, "The Wizard of Oz," and some minor textual changes were added, such as to "yellow daises," and changing a chapter title from "The Rescue" to "How the Four Were Reunited." The editions they published lacked most of the in-text color and color plates of the original. Many cost-cutting measures were implemented, including removal of some of the color printing without replacing it with black, printing nothing rather than the beard of the Soldier with the Green Whiskers.
When Baum filed for bankruptcy after his critically and popularly successful film and stage production The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays failed to make back its production costs, Baum lost the rights to all of the books published by what was now called Bobbs-Merrill, and they were licensed to the M. A. Donahue Company, which printed them in significantly cheaper "blotting paper" editions with advertising that directly competed with Baum's more recent books, published by the Reilly & Britton Company, from which he was making his living, explicitly hurting sales of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the new Oz book for 1913, to boost sales of Wizard, which Donahue called in a full-page ad in The Publishers' Weekly (June 28, 1913), Baum's "one pre-eminently great Juvenile Book." In a letter to Baum dated December 31, 1914, F.K. Reilly lamented that the average buyer employed by a retail store would not understand why he should be expected to spend 75 cents for a copy of Tik-Tok of Oz when he could buy a copy of Wizard for between 33 and 36 cents. Baum had previously written a letter complaining about the Donahue deal, which he did not know about until it was fait accompli, and one of the investors who held The Wizard of Oz rights had inquired why the royalty was only five or six cents per copy, depending on quantity sold, which made no sense to Baum.[64]
A new edition from Bobbs-Merrill in 1949 illustrated by Evelyn Copelman, again titled The New Wizard of Oz, paid lip service to Denslow but was based strongly, apart from the Lion, on the MGM movie. Copelman had illustrated a new edition of The Magical Monarch of Mo two years earlier.[65]
It was not until the book entered the public domain in 1956 that new editions, either with the original color plates, or new illustrations, proliferated.[66] A revised version of Copelman's artwork was published in a Grosset & Dunlap edition, and Reilly & Lee (formerly Reilly & Britton) published an edition in line with the Oz sequels, which had previously treated The Marvelous Land of Oz as the first Oz book,[67] not having the publication rights to Wizard, with new illustrations by Dale Ulrey.[17] Ulrey had previously illustrated Jack Snow's Jaglon and the Tiger-Faries, an expansion of a Baum short story, "The Story of Jaglon," and a 1955 edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz, though both sold poorly. Later Reilly & Lee editions used Denslow's original illustrations.
Notable more recent editions are the 1986 Pennyroyal edition illustrated by Barry Moser, which was reprinted by the University of California Press, and the 2000 The Annotated Wizard of Oz edited by Michael Patrick Hearn (heavily revised from a 1972 edition that was printed in a wide format that allowed for it to be a facsimile of the original edition with notes and additional illustrations at the sides), which was published by W. W. Norton and included all the original color illustrations, as well as supplemental artwork by Denslow. Other centennial editions included University Press of Kansas's Kansas Centennial Edition, illustrated by Michael McCurdy with black-and-white illustrations, and Robert Sabuda's pop-up book.
Influence and legacy
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has become an established part of multiple cultures, spreading from its early young American readership to becoming known throughout the world. It has been translated or adapted into nearly every major language, at times being modified in local variations.[72] For instance, in some abridged Indian editions, the Tin Woodman was replaced with a horse.[74] In Russia, a translation by Alexander Melentyevich Volkov produced six books, The Wizard of the Emerald City series, which became progressively distanced from the Baum version, as Ellie and her dog Totoshka travel throughout the Magic Land. The 1939 film adaptation has become a classic of popular culture, shown annually on American television from 1959 to 1998 and then several times a year every year beginning in 1999.[75]
In 1974, the story was re-envisioned as The Wiz, a Tony Award winning musical featuring an all-Black cast and set in the context of modern African-American culture.[76][77] This musical was adapted in 1978 as the feature film The Wiz, a musical adventure fantasy produced by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions.
There were several Hebrew translations published in Israel. As established in the first translation and kept in later ones, the book's Land of Oz was rendered in Hebrew as Eretz Uz (ארץ עוץ)—i.e. the same as the original Hebrew name of the Biblical Land of Uz, homeland of Job. Thus, for Hebrew readers, this translators' choice added a layer of Biblical connotations absent from the English original.
In 2018, "The Lost Art of Oz" project was initiated to locate and catalogue the surviving original artwork John R. Neill, W. W. Denslow, Frank Kramer, Richard "Dirk" Gringhuis, and Dick Martin that was created to illustrate the Oz book series.[78] In 2020, an Esperanto translation of the novel was used by a team of scientists to demonstrate a new method for encoding text in DNA that remains readable after repeated copying.[79]
Allegorical analysis
This book also seems to follow Joseph Campbell's a "Hero with a thousand faces" / "monomyth" theme. "To see The Wonderful Wizard of Oz simply as Dorothy's quest for a way to return to Kansas is to miss many of the sources of the books strength, for like most quest heroes, Dorothy achieves far more than simply finding her way home."[80] "The Wizard of Oz follows the course of the hero's journey in the structure of “Departure,” “Initiation,” and “Return” which Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces".[81]