Wicked

Born in Albany, New York in 1954, Gregory Maguire is the youngest of four children and was raised in the Catholic faith, which he still practices today. His early life was touched by loss, as his mother, Helen, died from complications during his birth, and he spent nearly two years in an orphanage before being reunited with his father after a remarriage. Maguire went on to earn a BA in English from the State University of New York at Albany, an MA in Children’s Literature from Simmons College, and a PhD in English Literature from Tufts University. He later taught Children’s Literature at Simmons while publishing numerous children’s books, including The Lightning Time and The Good Liar. His first adult novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, became a runaway success after its 1995 publication and inspired the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical that debuted in 2003, starring Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. The book has since spawned three sequels, as well as a critically acclaimed film adaptation starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Maguire has said that he writes to better understand himself, and that telling stories about characters who survive hardship reminds him that resilience is possible. He has been with his partner, Andy Newman, since the 1990s, and together they have three children. They currently reside in Concord, Massachusetts.

Wicked draws on both 19th-century history and more recent political events in its exploration of power and oppression. In the novel, the Wizard is revealed to be an Irishman from the United States, a man who once faced discrimination for his nationality before repeating the same cycle of oppression against the sentient Animals of Oz. This backstory echoes the real-world experiences of Irish immigrants who fled to the United States during the potato blight and Great Famine of the 1840s and 1850s, only to be met with hostility and prejudice. In a predominantly Protestant country, the Irish’s Catholic faith only compounded the blatant discrimination they faced. “No Irish Need Apply” storefront signs were common, and Irish workers were relegated to the hardest, lowest-paying jobs. By linking the Wizard’s past to this history, Maguire underscores the cruel irony of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. On another level, the novel’s broader political tensions were informed by the era in which Maguire began writing it—during the Gulf War in the early 1990s. At that time, Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian rule in Iraq dominated global headlines, and Maguire has said that this conflict, and the world’s effort to define and confront “evil,” pushed him to explore the corrupting influence of power.

Maguire’s Wicked is a creative retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), turning the classic children’s story into a tale of politics, ethics, and the making of a so-called villain. The other books in the Wicked series (Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz) expand on its political dimensions and follow the lives of familiar characters, including Liir and the Lion. For other reworkings of iconic figures in Western lore, Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018) give brand-new depth and life to popular Greek myths. Similarly, Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) imagines Penelope from The Odyssey with a sharp, feminist voice. Danielle Paige’s Dorothy Must Die (2014)—the first in a series of three novels—returns to Oz once more with a dark and morally layered take on the well-known tale. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), like Wicked, is a similarly atmospheric, character-driven journey about the lives of those traditionally cast as monsters, while Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) is a gothic exploration of magic and power.