Long hailed as one of the great classics of children’s literature, ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ tells the story of a young orphan girl, Dorothy, who is caught up in a cyclone and transported to the magical kingdom of Oz. In order to return home, Dorothy is instructed to travel to the City of Emeralds and ask the Wonderful Wizard of Oz for his help in getting her back to Kansas. Along the way, Dorothy befriends a strange groups of traveling companions – a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodsman and a cowardly Lion – who are all in need of the Wizard’s assistance. Thus begins this magical and wonderful journey into a world of unmatched imagination and creativity; a work that inspired no less than thirteen sequels and innumerable film, stage and television adaptations. ’The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ is one of the greatest children’s books in all of American literature.
This edition also features a brief biography of the author.
Over de auteur
L. Frank Baum was born Lyman Frank Baum on May 15, 1856, the seventh of nine children of Benjamin and Cynthia Ann Baum.
Baum’s father was enormously successful and Lyman grew up on the family’s huge estate – Rose Lawn- in Pennsylvania. Interested in writing from an early age, he managed to persuade his father to purchase a cheap printing press which he and his brother Harry used to produce a local journal, the Rose Lawn Home Journal.
But his early love was the theatre and as a young man, Baum performed often as ‘Louis F. Baum’ and ‘George Brooks.’ Eventually, his father bought him a theater in Richburg, NY where he wrote scripts and gathered a company together to perform them. While on tour with one of his plays, the Richburg theater burned to the ground, along with the only known copies of Baum’s scripts.
In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage and moved to the Dakota Territory, where he failed in business as a store owner. His literary ‘Kansas’ was said to be based on his time in drought-ridden South Dakota.
Baum continued writing, achieving moderate success with his book ‘Mother Goose in Prose’ in 1897. But in 1900, he published ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ‘ which became a phenomenon. He would eventually write thirteen additional Oz books and brought ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to the stage as well, where it ran on Broadway and toured America.
Baum never stopped writing and, upon his death following a stroke in 1919, Baum had completed 41 novels (apart from the Oz books), 83 short stories, 200 poems at at least 42 scripts.
He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.