Introduction

When L. Frank Baum closed the covers of his runaway 1900 bestseller, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he believed he had said all he wished to say about the magical country beyond the deadly desert. He had given the world a heroine in gingham, a road paved with yellow brick, and a quartet of unforgettable companions whose longings for brains, heart, courage, and home had touched something deep in the American imagination. He fully expected to move on to other projects, other fairy tales, other landscapes of his fertile mind. But Baum had not reckoned with his readers. Children, by the thousands and then the hundreds of thousands, refused to let Oz go. They wrote him letters. They begged for more. They wanted to know what happened next—not necessarily to Dorothy, who had returned safely to Kansas, but to the wondrous land itself, to its Scarecrow and its Tin Woodman and to all the strange and delightful corners that the first book had only begun to explore.

And so, in 1904, four years after the original, Baum returned to the country he had created and gave the world this second book—a sequel that is at once a continuation and a fresh beginning, a story that honors what came before while striking out boldly in new directions. What you hold in your hands is a modern translation of that beloved tale, adapted with care for the contemporary reader so that the language, the rhythms, and the references feel inviting rather than dusty, while the irrepressible spirit of Baum’s original remains gloriously intact. This is a book to be savored slowly, read aloud if you have the chance, and returned to whenever the world feels too gray and you find yourself longing for somewhere greener.

Readers approaching this book with memories of Dorothy’s adventure should prepare for a few delightful surprises. This is not simply The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with the names changed and the scenery rearranged. Baum was far too inventive a storyteller to repeat himself, and in this second outing he made a number of bold choices that distinguish the sequel sharply from its predecessor. Most strikingly, the little girl from Kansas does not appear—at least not in the way one might expect. Baum deliberately stepped away from his original heroine, introducing instead an entirely new protagonist whose journey forms the beating heart of this tale. This decision, daring for an author whose fame rested almost entirely on a single child character, signals from the very first pages that the writer intended to expand the boundaries of his magical world rather than merely retread familiar ground.

The effect is invigorating. By shifting the perspective and the cast, Baum frees himself to show us parts of Oz we never glimpsed before, to introduce inventions and creatures and personalities that broaden our sense of just how vast and varied this country truly is. The land that seemed almost fully mapped at the end of the first book reveals itself here to be far larger, far stranger, and far more populous than we had ever imagined. There are kingdoms within kingdoms, characters whose ambitions and follies drive the plot forward with comic energy, and at least one creation so marvelously absurd that it has become a fixture of Oz lore ever since. Baum understood that a fairy land is only as interesting as the things we have not yet seen in it, and so he gives us, in this volume, a generous helping of the new.

At the same time, the sequel never abandons the friends we came to love in the first book. The Scarecrow returns, as wise and good-hearted and faintly ridiculous as ever, his stuffing of brains put to use in ways both clever and unexpectedly touching. The Tin Woodman, too, makes his appearance, gleaming and gentle, forever attentive to the feelings of those around him. To watch these familiar figures interact with the newcomers is one of the great pleasures of the book. Baum had a rare gift for character, and he understood that readers do not simply want to know what happens to the people they love—they want to spend time with them, to enjoy their company, to hear them banter and bicker and reason through their dilemmas with the peculiar logic that governs Oz. The conversations in this book are frequently its finest moments, full of gentle wit and absurd reasoning that somehow arrives at perfect sense.

There is, too, a quality of playfulness in this volume that pervades every chapter. The subtitle promises a “playful” sequel, and the description is apt. Where the first book carried a certain undertone of yearning—Dorothy’s homesickness, the companions’ sense of incompleteness—this second adventure is lighter on its feet, more given to comedy and to the sheer delight of invention. Baum seems to be enjoying himself enormously, tossing off marvelous ideas with the casual generosity of a man who has discovered a bottomless well of imagination. Magical transformations, impossible journeys, comic misunderstandings, and a cheerful disregard for the ordinary laws of nature tumble across the pages one after another. The reader is swept along not by suspense in the conventional sense, but by a constant, joyful curiosity about what extraordinary thing might appear next.

This is not to say the book lacks substance. Beneath its merry surface, Baum weaves in themes that reward attention. Questions of identity—of who a person truly is and how they come to know themselves—run quietly throughout the narrative. There are gentle reflections on power and its proper use, on the difference between cleverness and wisdom, on loyalty and friendship and the responsibilities we bear toward one another. Baum never lectures; he was congenitally incapable of preachiness, and he had a healthy distrust of the heavy-handed morals that weighed down so much children’s literature in his era. In the introduction to his first Oz book, he had famously declared his intention to write a “modernized fairy tale” in which “the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” The sequel honors that pledge. Its lessons, such as they are, arrive lightly, woven into the fabric of an adventure that never forgets its first duty is to delight.

One element of this book deserves particular mention, though to describe it in detail would spoil one of its loveliest surprises. Baum, writing in an age very different from our own, was nonetheless a man of unusually progressive sympathies in certain respects—his own mother-in-law was the celebrated suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the women of his life were strong, intelligent, and politically engaged. Something of that influence finds its way into the pages that follow, in a manner both comic and quietly subversive. Readers attuned to such things will find moments that feel surprisingly modern, even prescient, and that add an extra dimension of interest to a story that might otherwise seem purely whimsical. Baum’s Oz was always, in its gentle way, a place where the usual rules of the world could be questioned and overturned, and this book extends that tradition in directions that may catch the careful reader off guard.

The structure of the narrative follows the time-honored shape of the quest, that most ancient and satisfying of story patterns. A journey is undertaken; obstacles are met and overcome; companions are gathered along the way; and the whole moves toward a resolution that ties together the various threads in a manner both surprising and inevitable. Baum was a master of pacing, and he keeps the story moving briskly, rarely lingering too long in any one place before sweeping his characters—and his readers—onward to the next marvel. This episodic quality, in which each chapter brings a fresh encounter or a new wonder, makes the book ideally suited to reading in small portions, a chapter or two at a sitting, whether alone or shared aloud with a child at bedtime. Yet it also rewards the reader who chooses to devour it in a single long, happy session, for the cumulative effect of all these wonders piling one atop another is a kind of joyful intoxication.

To understand this book fully, it helps to understand a little about the remarkable man who wrote it. Lyman Frank Baum—he detested the name Lyman and went by Frank all his life—was born in 1856 in upstate New York, the son of a father who had made a considerable fortune in the oil business. He was a sickly child with a weak heart, much given to daydreaming, and from an early age he displayed the kind of restless, romantic imagination that finds the ordinary world insufficient. He tried his hand at an extraordinary number of careers before finding his true calling. He raised fancy chickens and wrote a treatise on poultry. He acted on the stage and wrote plays. He ran a variety store in a frontier town in the Dakota Territory, which failed. He edited a newspaper, which also failed. He sold china and glassware as a traveling salesman. He founded and edited a trade journal for shop-window decorators, an early form of what we would now call visual merchandising—a field in which his flair for spectacle and arrangement served him well.

Through all these ventures, two constants remained: he was forever short of money, and he was forever telling stories. Baum had a genius for spinning tales, and he honed it on his own four sons and on the neighborhood children who gathered around him. He did not set out to be a famous author; he stumbled into it almost by accident, encouraged by his formidable mother-in-law and by his devoted wife, Maud, who had a sharper head for practical matters than her dreamy husband. His first real success came with a collection of nursery rhymes, followed by a book of original fairy tales. But it was the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, illustrated by W. W. Denslow, that transformed his fortunes and made his name a household word.

The success of that first book was enormous and, for Baum, life-changing. After decades of struggle and failure, he had at last found the thing he was meant to do. But success brought its own complications. Baum was a spendthrift and a dreamer, perpetually pouring his earnings into ambitious projects—stage productions, early experiments in film, elaborate musical extravaganzas based on his books. He was, in the truest sense, a showman, and he could never resist the lure of a grand theatrical gesture. Indeed, this very book owes part of its existence to the stage. A wildly popular musical extravaganza based on the first Oz story had been touring the country, and Baum, ever the entrepreneur, conceived of the sequel partly with an eye toward adapting it for the theater as well. Some scholars detect in the book’s broad comedy and its memorable comic duo the influence of vaudeville and musical theater, the kind of knockabout humor that played well before a live audience. Whether or not one accepts this reading, there is no denying the theatrical energy that animates the story—the sense of a born entertainer working to keep his audience laughing and gasping by turns.

Baum would go on to write a great many more Oz books—fourteen in all before his death in 1919—along with dozens of other fairy tales and adventures, some published under pseudonyms. He never quite escaped Oz; he tried more than once to close the series and turn to other things, only to be drawn back by the inexhaustible appetite of his readers. In one famous attempt, he declared the magical country sealed off from the outside world forever, a barrier that conveniently proved permeable when commercial necessity required it. He came to call himself the “Royal Historian of Oz,” a charming conceit that positioned him not as the inventor of these tales but merely as their faithful recorder, transcribing reports that reached him from the magical land by various improbable means. It was a fiction his young readers happily embraced, and it lent the entire series a delightful air of being true.

What makes Baum’s work endure is harder to pin down. Part of it is the sheer fertility of his invention—few authors have ever populated their imaginary worlds with such an abundance of original creatures, characters, and contraptions. Part of it is his distinctively American sensibility. Baum consciously set out to create a fairy tale free of the European traditions of wicked witches and dark forests and grim moral lessons—though witches do appear, they are recognizably of the New World, brisk and businesslike rather than gothic and terrifying. His Oz is a land of practical magic, of inventions and gadgets, of democratic good sense rubbing shoulders with the marvelous. There is something quintessentially American in its optimism, its egalitarianism, its faith that ordinary individuals possessed of good hearts and willing hands can overcome any obstacle.