Description
Book SynopsisL. Frank Baum was born in New York in 1856.
The Wizard of Oz, published in 1900
, was based on a story he used to tell his own children. It became an international bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a stage play (1902) and a film starring Judy Garland (1939). Baum wrote thirteen further Oz books, alongside numerous other novels, short stories, scripts and poems. After his death in 1919, his publishers carried on producing Oz stories and didn't stop until 1963.
Trade ReviewLike Robin Hood, Alice or Winnie the Pooh, Baum's inventions - the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as Dorothy and her dog Toto - have become the mythological furniture of our children's minds, and of our own and our parents... Funny and inventive -- Marina Warner * Guardian *
The tales of Aesop and other fabulists...will never pass entirely away, but a welcome place remains and will easily be found for such stories as
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz * New York Times *
Baum created a truly extraordinary world, a real world…and filled it with amazing things -- Dinitia Smith
[It] has worked its way into the national psyche as a fable of eternal hope in which things are not always as fearsome as they seem * New York Times *
Baum dared to offer delight without instruction * Michael Patrick Hearn *
