The story chronicles the adventures of a young farm girl named Dorothy in the magical Land of Oz, after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their Kansas home by a cyclone. She meets a living Scarecrow, a man made entirely of tin, and a Cowardly Lion while trying to get to the Emerald City to see the great Wizard.
The novel is one of the best-known stories in American literature and has been widely translated. The Library of Congress has declared it ‘America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale’. Its groundbreaking success and the success of the Broadway musical adapted from the novel led Baum to write thirteen additional Oz books that serve as official sequels to the first story.
‘Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919) was an American author, actor, and independent filmmaker best known as the creator, along with illustrator W. W. Denslow, of one of the most popular books in American children’s literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, better known today as simply The Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a plethora of other works (55 novels in total, 82 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings), and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen.’