The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum

Baum's personal life

According to Baum's son, Harry Neal, the author had often told his children "whimsical stories before they became material for his books."[19] Harry Baum called his father the "swellest man I knew," a man who was able to give a decent reason as to why black birds cooked in a pie could afterwards get out and sing.[19]

Many of the characters, props, and ideas in the novel were drawn from Baum's personal life and experiences.[20] Baum held different jobs, moved a lot, and was exposed to many people, so the inspiration for the story could have been taken from many different aspects of his life.[20] In the introduction to the story, Baum writes that "it aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out."[21]

Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman

As a child, Baum frequently had nightmares of a scarecrow pursuing him across a field.[22] Moments before the scarecrow's "ragged hay fingers" nearly gripped his neck, it would fall apart before his eyes. Decades later, as an adult, Baum integrated his tormentor into the novel as the Scarecrow.[23] In the early 1880s, Baum's play Matches was being performed when a "flicker from a kerosene lantern sparked the rafters", causing the Baum opera house to be consumed by flames. Scholar Evan I. Schwartz suggested that this might have inspired the Scarecrow's severest terror: "There is only one thing in the world I am afraid of. A lighted match."[24]

According to Baum's son Harry, the Tin Woodman was born from Baum's attraction to window displays. He wished to make something captivating for the window displays, so he used an eclectic assortment of scraps to craft a striking figure. From a wash-boiler he made a body, from bolted stovepipes he made arms and legs, and from the bottom of a saucepan he made a face. Baum then placed a funnel hat on the figure, which ultimately became the Tin Woodman.[25]

Dorothy, Uncle Henry, and the Witches

Baum's wife Maud Gage frequently visited their newborn niece, Dorothy Louise Gage, whom she adored as the daughter she never had. The infant became gravely sick and died at the age of five months in Bloomington, Illinois, on November 11, 1898, from "congestion of the brain". Maud was devastated.[26] To assuage her distress, Baum made his protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a girl named Dorothy, and he dedicated the book to his wife.[27] The baby was buried at Evergreen Cemetery, where her gravestone has a statue of the character Dorothy placed next to it.[28]

Baum's mother-in-law, activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, has also been cited as one of the inspirations for Dorothy.[29]

Decades later, Jocelyn Burdick—the daughter of Baum's other niece, Magdalena Carpenter, and a former Democratic U.S. Senator from North Dakota—asserted that her mother also partly inspired the character of Dorothy.[30] Burdick claimed that her great-uncle spent "considerable time at the Сarpenter homestead... and became very attached to Magdalena."[30] Burdick has reported many similarities between her mother's homestead and the farm of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.[30]

Uncle Henry was modeled after Henry Gage, Baum's father-in-law. Bossed around by his wife Matilda, Henry rarely dissented with her. He flourished in business, though, and his neighbors looked up to him. Likewise, Uncle Henry was a "passive but hard-working man" who "looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke".[31]

The witches in the novel were influenced by witch-hunting research gathered by Matilda Joslyn Gage. The stories of barbarous acts against accused witches scared Baum. Two key events in the novel involve wicked witches who meet their death through metaphorical means.[32] Baum's biographers have also drawn correlations between Baum's Good Witch and Gage's feminist writings.[33]

The Emerald City and the Land of Oz

In 1890, Baum lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota during a drought, and he wrote a story in his "Our Landlady" column in Aberdeen's The Saturday Pioneer about a farmer who gave green goggles to his horses, causing them to believe that the wood chips that they were eating were pieces of grass.[34] Similarly, the Wizard made the people in the Emerald City wear green goggles so that they would believe that their city was built from emeralds.[35]

During Baum's short stay in Aberdeen, the dissemination of myths about the West continued. However, the West, instead of being a wonderland, turned into a wasteland because of a drought and a depression. In 1891, Baum moved his family from South Dakota to Chicago. At that time, Chicago was getting ready for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Scholar Laura Barrett stated that Chicago was "considerably more akin to Oz than to Kansas". After discovering that the myths about the West's incalculable riches were baseless, Baum created "an extension of the American frontier in Oz". In many respects, Baum's creation is similar to the actual frontier save for the fact that the West was still undeveloped at the time. The Munchkins Dorothy encounters at the beginning of the novel represent farmers, as do the Winkies she later meets.[36]

Local legend has it that Oz, also known as the Emerald City, was inspired by a prominent castle-like building in the community of Castle Park near Holland, Michigan, where Baum lived during the summer. The yellow brick road was derived from a road at that time paved by yellow bricks, located in Peekskill, New York, where Baum attended the Peekskill Military Academy. Baum scholars often refer to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (the "White City") as an inspiration for the Emerald City. Other legends suggest that the inspiration came from the Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego, California. Baum was a frequent guest at the hotel and had written several of the Oz books there.[37] In a 1903 interview with The Publishers' Weekly,[38] Baum said that the name "Oz" came from his file cabinet labeled "O–Z".[39][22]

Some critics have suggested that Baum's Oz may have been inspired by Australia. Australia is often colloquially spelled or referred to as "Oz". Furthermore, in Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy gets back to Oz as the result of a storm at sea while she and Uncle Henry are traveling by ship to Australia. Like Australia, Oz is an island continent somewhere to the west of California with inhabited regions bordering on a great desert. Baum perhaps intended Oz to be Australia or a magical land in the center of the great Australian desert.[40]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In addition to being influenced by the fairy-tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen,[41] Baum was significantly influenced by English writer Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.[42] Although Baum found the plot of Carroll's novel to be incoherent, he identified the book's source of popularity as Alice herself—a child with whom younger readers could identify, and this influenced Baum's choice of Dorothy as his protagonist.[41]

Baum also was influenced by Carroll's views that all children's books should be lavishly illustrated, be pleasurable to read, and not contain any moral lessons.[43] During the Victorian era, Carroll had rejected the popular expectation that children's books must be saturated with moral lessons and instead he contended that children should be allowed to be children.[44]

Although influenced by Carroll's distinctly English work, Baum nonetheless sought to create a story that had recognizable American elements, such as farming and industrialization.[43] Consequently, Baum combined the conventional features of a fairy tale such as witches and wizards with well-known fixtures in his young readers' Midwestern lives such as scarecrows and cornfields.[45]

Influence of Denslow

The original illustrator of the novel, W. W. Denslow, aided in the development of Baum's story and greatly influenced the way it has been interpreted.[22] Baum and Denslow had a close working relationship and worked together to create the presentation of the story through the images and the text.[22] Color is an important element of the story and is present throughout the images, with each chapter having a different color representation. Denslow also added characteristics to his drawings that Baum never described. For example, Denslow drew a house and the gates of the Emerald City with faces on them.

In the later Oz books, John R. Neill, who illustrated all the sequels, continued to use elements from Denslow's earlier illustrations, including faces on the Emerald City's gates.[46] Another aspect is the Tin Woodman's funnel hat, which is not mentioned in the text until later books but appears in most artists' interpretation of the character, including the stage and film productions of 1902–09, 1908, 1910, 1914, 1925, 1931, 1933, 1939, 1982, 1985, 1988, 1992, and others. One of the earliest illustrators not to include a funnel hat was Russell H. Schulz in the 1957 Whitman Publishing edition—Schulz depicted him wearing a pot on his head. Libico Maraja's illustrations, which first appeared in a 1957 Italian edition and have also appeared in English-language and other editions, are well known for depicting him bareheaded.

Allusions to 19th-century America

Many decades after its publication, Baum's work gave rise to a number of political interpretations, particularly in regards to the 19th-century Populist movement in the United States.[47] In a 1964 American Quarterly article titled "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism",[48] educator Henry Littlefield posited that the book served an allegory for the late 19th-century bimetallism debate regarding monetary policy.[49][50] Littlefield's thesis achieved some support but was widely criticized by others.[51][52][53] Other political interpretations soon followed. In 1971, historian Richard J. Jensen theorized in The Winning of the Midwest that "Oz" was derived from the common abbreviation for "ounce", used for denoting quantities of gold and silver.[54]