The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Annotated)

The Founding Text of American Fantasy | L. Frank Baum | Erato Press

By: L. Frank Baum

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Before Tolkien. Before Lewis. Before every portal fantasy ever written — there was Dorothy, a cyclone, and a road paved with yellow brick.

L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. It was not the first fantasy novel, but it was the first distinctly American one: a story without the feudal hierarchies of European fairy tales, without the moralizing cruelty of Grimm and Andersen, without kings and princes and hereditary destinies. What Baum invented instead was something stranger and more radical — a fantasy in which an ordinary girl from Kansas, with no special lineage, no magical inheritance, and no particular virtue beyond stubbornness and loyalty, walks into another world and dismantles its ruling power by accident.

The Scarecrow who wants a brain. The Tin Woodman who wants a heart. The Cowardly Lion who wants courage. The Wizard who turns out to be a man behind a curtain. And Dorothy, who had the power to go home all along — and didn't know it.

This annotated Erato Press edition presents the complete text of the 1900 first edition with critical afterwords and biographical notes by Henry Bugalho that restore the novel to its proper place: not as a children's story that adults have sentimental attachment to, but as the founding document of American fantasy literature — the text that made possible every portal fantasy, every chosen hero from an ordinary world, every magical land with its own internal logic and political economy that followed it.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) — Complete and unabridged, from the first edition text: all twenty-four chapters, from the cyclone in Kansas to the revelation of the Wizard's fraud to Dorothy's return, restored to the directness and strangeness of Baum's original prose, before a century of adaptation softened what was always a genuinely unsettling book.

✦ The complete first edition text — unabridged, in authoritative source edition.

This edition also includes: ✦ Critical afterword: The American Fairy Tale — on what Baum meant by inventing a fantasy that would have no nightmares and no moralizing, and why the book he actually wrote is considerably darker than that description suggests ✦ Critical afterword: The Wizard Behind the Curtain — on the political allegory that scholars have debated for a century: the silver shoes, the yellow brick road, the Emerald City whose greenness is an optical illusion, and what all of it might have meant in 1900 ✦ A Note on L. Frank Baum — biographical essay on the man who was a failed actor, failed shopkeeper, and failed newspaper editor before he wrote the best-selling children's book of 1900 and spent the rest of his life unable to write anything else

✦ This edition is the gateway to the complete Oz series — The Complete Oz Series by L. Frank Baum, available separately from Erato Press, collects all fourteen canonical Oz novels with full critical apparatus.

For readers who enjoy: ✦ Fantasy fiction that invented the rules everyone else has been following since ✦ Classic American novels that reward adult reading as much as childhood memory ✦ The origin stories of entire genres — read at the source, not through the adaptations ✦ A beloved American classic in an edition that takes it seriously

"You have plenty of courage, I am sure. All you need is confidence in yourself."