THE WIZARD OF OZ

About The Book

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is a children's book written by L. Frank Baum and
illustrated by W.W. Denslow. It was originally published in 1900, and has since been reprinted countless times, sometimes under the name The Wizard of Oz. The book was the best-selling children's book for two years after its initial publication.

The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. It is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success led to Baum's writing and having published thirteen more Oz books.

Baum acknowledged the influence of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, which he was deliberately revising in his "American fairy tales" to include the wonder without the horrors.

Another influence lay in the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. Although he found their plots hard to follow, Baum identified their source of popularity as Alice herself, a child with whom the child readers could identify;
this influenced his choice of a lead

About The Author

Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856–May 6, 1919) was born in Chittenango, New York, into a devout Methodist family of German (father's side) and Scots-Irish (mother's side) origin, the seventh of nine children born to Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Baum, only five of whom survived into adulthood. He was named "Lyman" after his father's brother, but always disliked this name, and preferred to go by "Frank".

Two years after Wizard's publication, Baum and Denslow teamed up with composer Paul Tietjens and director Julian Mitchell to produce a musical stage version of the book under Fred R. Hamlin. This stage version, the first to use the shortened title "The Wizard of Oz", opened in Chicago in 1902, and then ran on Broadway for 293 stage nights from January to October 1903. It returned to Broadway in 1904, where it played from March to May and again from November to December. Other books about Oz are:-


The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Scarecrow of Oz Ozma of Oz
The Lost Princess of Oz
The Magic of Oz
Tik-Tok of Oz
Rinkitink in Oz
The Tin Woodman of Oz
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
The Marvellous Land of Oz
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
The Emerald City of Oz
The Road to Oz

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