THE
WIZARD OF OZ |
About The Book
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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
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About
The Author
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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:-
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The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Scarecrow of Oz Ozma of Oz
The Lost Princess of Oz
The Magic of Oz
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Tik-Tok
of Oz
Rinkitink in Oz
The Tin Woodman of Oz
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
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The
Marvellous Land of Oz
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
The Emerald City of Oz
The Road to Oz |
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