The Wonderful Wizard of Oz follows the adventures of a young girl named Dorothy Gale in the Land of Oz, after being swept away from her Kansas farm home in a cyclone. Dorothy quickly teams up with a cowardly lion, a scarecrow and a tin man, and they set out on a quest to find the Wizard of Oz. They soon find out that the wizard is not quite who they expect, and that they must seek Glinda, the Good Witch of the South.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success, and the success of the 1902 Broadway musical which Baum adapted from his original story, led to the famous 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, and the 2003 musical, Wicked.
This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.
Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 - May 6, 1919) was an American author chiefly famous for his children's books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote a total of 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts. He made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and the nascent medium of film; the 1939 adaptation of the first Oz book would become a landmark of 20th-century cinema. His works anticipated such century-later commonplaces as television, augmented reality, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), women in high-risk and action-heavy occupations (Mary Louise in the Country), police corruption and false evidence (Phoebe Daring), and the ubiquity of advertising on clothing (Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work). Baum's avowed intentions with the Oz books and other fairy tales was to retell tales such as are found in the works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, make them in an American vein, update them, avoid stereotypical characters such as dwarfs or genies, and remove the association of violence and moral teachings. The first books contained a fair amount of violence, but it decreased with the series; in The Emerald City of Oz, Ozma objected to doing violence even to the Nomes who threaten Oz with invasion. His introduction is often cited as the beginnings of the sanitization of children's stories, although he did not do a great deal more than eliminate harsh moral lessons.
