The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and it almost immediately became the bestselling American children’s book of the new century. Baum had been writing in various genres for years without much success. This one stuck. The story is the foundational one. A Kansas farm girl named Dorothy and her dog Toto are swept up by a cyclone and dropped into the fantasy country of Oz, where the house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East and frees the Munchkins. Dorothy puts on the dead witch’s silver shoes, which in the original book are silver rather than the ruby of the famous MGM film, and starts walking the Yellow Brick Road toward the Emerald City to ask the Wizard for help getting home.

Along the way she gathers her three companions: the Scarecrow who thinks he needs a brain, the Tin Woodman who thinks he needs a heart, and the Cowardly Lion who thinks he needs courage. They confront the Wicked Witch of the West. They discover the Wizard is a humbug. They each learn they already had what they were seeking. Baum’s writing is plainer than later children’s authors made standard, and there is a certain matter-of-fact strangeness to the original text that the famous film smoothed over. Read it as a starting point for the entire fourteen-book Baum Oz series, not as a novelization of the 1939 movie.