The Wizard of Oz Study Guide

Lyman Frank Baum was born into a wealthy New York family in 1856. He started writing at an early age, and one of his earliest passions was the theatre. Baum wrote and acted in several plays, often using stage names, but with limited financial success. He married his wife, Maud Gage, in 1882, and the two of them moved to South Dakota in 1888. While Baum’s life as a newspaper editor there was fairly uneventful, he later admitted that his time in South Dakota inspired his depiction of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In 1891, he moved to Chicago with his wife and children, writing for a new publication and focusing on advertising and sales. While his first attempt as a children’s author was his book Mother Goose in Prose, he wouldn’t find significant success until the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Oz quickly became a classic, and it wasn’t long before Baum began to work on sequels and even a stage adaptation. While his Oz series was a great success, he continued to struggle financially as he funded many extravagant theatrical productions. Baum died of a stroke in 1919, and his final Oz book was published posthumously one year later.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published at the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States was beginning to take a more central place on the world stage, both economically and culturally. Baum’s publication of Oz was yet another sign of America’s growing cultural relevance, as it came to be considered America’s first great fairy tale. While Oz includes many traditional fairy tale elements, it also stands out as uniquely American, lacking the moralizing tone of most children’s stories at the time and featuring a self-reliant young heroine. Additionally, while Baum denied that he wrote Oz with any moral or message in mind, later scholars believed they found hidden messages and political symbolism in Baum’s books. This idea began to gain traction after Henry Littlefield, a high school teacher, published his theory that The Wizard of Oz was a satirical allegory for populism. Broadly, the American populist movement of the late 19th century was chiefly concerned with diminishing the financial establishment’s power in favor of giving the common people more political power. Littlefield couldn’t help but notice the parallels in Oz, as its heroes follow a road symbolically paved with gold, and characters like the Scarecrow start out as commoners and become rulers. While Littlefield’s theories were often dismissed, they add another layer of depth to the otherwise simple Oz stories, whether this was Baum’s intention or not.

Naturally, the works most closely related to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are the many sequels Baum wrote to continue Dorothy’s story and expand on the Oz mythos. Including Glinda of Oz, which was published a year after Baum’s death, Baum wrote 14 Oz books in total. These sequels deal with similar themes and follow many of the same characters. They also give more depth and lore to the Land of Oz, though it remains a whimsical fairy-tale world of clearly defined good and evil. The classic dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are also an inspiration for The Wizard of Oz, by Baum’s own admission. The Chronicles of Narnia is another comparable series of 20th-century fairy tales about children finding themselves in a strange and magical land. However, while Oz shares many similarities with these stories, Baum made an effort to distance his work from the often-harsh moral tone of Narnia and the Brothers Grimm tales. While the Grimm stories are full of cautionary tales, and Narnia often focuses on direct Christian symbolism, The Wizard of Oz is ostensibly only meant to entertain children. Imparting moral lessons is something that Baum wished to avoid with his Oz books, though whether he succeeded in this task is open to interpretation. In 1995, Gregory Maguire published Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is the first in a series of novels that expand on Baum’s world and characters.