Although
this Web site does not have the space to include
all of the Introduction and biographical portrait
of L. Frank Baum found in the print edition of Hey!
Listen to This,
below is a condensation
of the Introduction: INTRODUCTION:
L.
Frank Baum (pronounced
BOMB) had failed at almost everything he tried.
But because of a nightly bedtime ritual—coupled
with either a stroke of genius or a stroke of luck,
he became the creator of America's first original
fairy tale and its first science fiction writer.
Near the end of the last century,
Baum and his wife were raising four boys and, as
often happens with writers, his daily storytelling
sessions began to reach into the soul of his talent.
One night he was sitting in the hall, telling his
sons a story, "and suddenly this one moved
right in and took possession," he recalled
later. "I shooed the children away and grabbed
a piece of paper that was lying there on the rack
and began to write. It really seemed to write itself.
Then I couldn't find any regular paper, so I took
anything at all, even a bunch of old envelopes."
At one point in the writing,
he had the first part of the book's title but couldn't
think of the rest. He had the word "Wizard"
but wizard of what? At that point
he glanced at his three-drawer file cabinet. The
top drawer was labeled A-G; the middle was H-N;
and the bottom was O-Z. And thus was born the name
for "Oz."
 What
L. Frank Baum eventually wrote was something so
altogether different, it became the first of its
kind. He created a magic land, surrounded by deserts,
and filled with wizards, witches, strange creatures,
and incredible inventions. It was The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
From the very first day, the
children loved it! It was the bestselling children
book of the year. In fact, the children and parents
immediately wanted more and demanded a sequel.
Frank, on the other hand, wanted to go on to other
stories. Finally, when his other books didn't sell,
and after 10,000 pleading letters from children,
he wrote a sequel. And then another. All told,
he wrote 14 books about the magical kingdom, each
one devoured by his loyal readers.
Eventually he moved to Hollywood
and tried to make silent movies about Oz but they
all flopped. He died at age 62, the author of more
than 50 books and dozens of plays, but only the
14 Oz books were successful.
He was America's first science
fiction writer. Indeed, as often happens in sci-fi,
some of his imagining eventually became reality.
Fourteen years after Baum wrote about a mechanical
man, the word "robot"
was coined—but Baum imagined him first. Fifty
years before Walt Disney created
a real magic kingdom, Baum imagined one. And almost
a half-century before Dr.
Seuss gave us fluff-muffled Truffles,
Poozers, Skrinks, and one-wheeler Wubbles, Baum
created Wheelers, Scoodlers, Munchkins, Skeezers,
and Quadlings. (On the World Wide Web, see also The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz Web Site (www.eskimo.com/~tiktok/index.html.
Frank Baum was a dreamer but
not even he could have dreamed how big a success
was waiting for that book back in 1899 when he
was writing it. Today, because of the various movie
or video versions of The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz, it is hard to find a five-year-old
who is not familiar with it. Too often this keeps
parents and teachers from reading aloud other Oz
books and that's a shame because the third book
in the series is often regarded as one of the best—Ozma
of Oz. Here is the opening chapter
from that book, accompanied by some of John R.
Neil's art from the original editions, now reproduced
in Morrow's "Books of Wonder" series.
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CHAPTER 1:
The Girl in the
Chicken Coop
 he wind
blew hard and joggled the water of the ocean, sending
ripples across its surface. Then the wind pushed the
edges of the ripples until they became waves, and shoved
the waves around until they became billows.
The
billows rolled dreadfully high: higher even than
the tops of houses. Some of them, indeed, rolled
as high as the tops of tall trees, and seemed like
mountains; and the gulfs between the great billows
were like deep valleys. All this mad dashing and
splashing of the waters of the big ocean, which the
mischievous wind caused without any good reason whatever,
resulted in a terrible storm, and a storm on the
ocean is liable to cut many queer pranks and do a
lot of damage.
At the time the wind began to blow,
a ship was sailing far out upon the waters. When
the waves began to tumble and toss and to grow bigger
and bigger the ship rolled up and down, and tipped
sidewise—first one way and then the other—and
was jostled around so roughly that even the sailor-men
had to hold fast to the ropes and railings to keep
themselves from being swept away by the wind or pitched
headlong into the sea.
And the clouds were so thick in
the sky that the sunlight couldn't get through them;
so that the day drew dark as night, which added to
the terrors of the storm.
he Captain
of the ship was not afraid, because he had seen storms
before, and had sailed his ship through
them in safety; but he knew that
his passengers would be in danger
if they tried to stay on deck, so
he put them all into the cabin and
told them to stay there until after
the storm was over, and to keep brave hearts and
not be scared, and all would be well
with them.
Now, among these passengers was
a little Kansas girl named Dorothy Gale,who was going
with her Uncle Henry to Australia, to visit some
relatives they had never before seen. Uncle Henry,
you must know, was not very well, because he had
been working so hard on his Kansas farm that his
health had given way and left him weak and nervous.
So he left Aunt Em at home to watch after the hired
men and to take care of the farm, while he traveled
far away to Australia to visit his cousins and have
a good rest.
Dorothy was eager to go with him
on this journey, and Uncle Henry thought she would
be good company and help cheer him up; so he decided
to take her along. The little girl was quite an experienced
traveler, for she had once been carried by a cyclone
as far away from home as the marvelous Land of Oz,
and she had met with a good many adventures in that
strange country before she managed to get back to
Kansas again. So she wasn't easily frightened, whatever
happened, and when the wind began to howl and whistle,
and the waves began to tumble and toss, our little
girl didn't mind the uproar the least bit.
"Of course we'll have to stay
in the cabin," she said to Uncle Henry and the
other passengers, "and keep as quiet as possible
until the storm is over. For the Captain says if
we go on deck we may be blown overboard."
No one wanted to risk such an accident
as that, you may be sure; so all the passengers stayed
huddled up in the dark cabin, listening to the shrieking
of the storm and the creaking of the masts and rigging
and trying to keep from bumping into one another
when the ship tipped sidewise.
Dorothy had almost fallen asleep
when she was aroused with a start to find that Uncle
Henry was missing. She couldn't imagine where he
had gone, and as he was not very strong she began
to worry about him, and to fear he might have been
careless enough to go on deck. In that case he would
be in great danger unless he instantly came down
again.
The fact was that Uncle Henry had
gone to lie down in his little sleeping-berth, but
Dorothy did not know that. She only remembered that
Aunt Em had cautioned her to take good care of her
uncle, so at once she decided to go on deck and find
him, in spite of the fact that the tempest was now
worse than ever, and the ship was plunging in a really
dreadful manner. Indeed, the little girl found it
was as much as she could do to mount the stairs to
the deck, and as soon as she got there the wind struck
her so fiercely that it almost tore away the skirts
of her dress.
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Yet
Dorothy felt a sort of joyous excitement in defying
the storm, and while she held fast
to the railing she peered around
through the gloom and thought she
saw the dim form of a man clinging
to a mast not far away from her.
This might be her uncle, so she called
as loudly as she could: "Uncle
Henry! Uncle Henry!"
But the wind screeched and howled
so madly that she scarce heard her own voice, and
the man certainly failed to hear her, for he did
not move.
Dorothy decided she must go to
him; so she made a dash forward, during a lull in
the storm, to where a big square chicken-coop had
been lashed to the deck with ropes. She reached this
place in safety, but no sooner had she seized fast
hold of the slats of the big box in which the chickens
were kept than the wind, as if enraged because the
little girl dared to resist its power, suddenly redoubled
its fury.
 ith a
scream like that of an angry giant it tore away the
ropes that held the coop and lifted
it high into the air, with Dorothy
still clinging to the slats. Around
and over it whirled, this way and
that, and a few moments later the
chicken-coop dropped faraway into
the sea, where the big waves caught
it and slid it up-hill to a foaming
crest and then down-hill into a deep
valley, as if it were nothing more
than a plaything to keep them amused.
Dorothy had a good ducking, you
may be sure, but she didn't lose her presence of
mind even for a second. She kept tight hold of the
stout slats and as soon as she could get the water
out of her eyes she saw that the wind had ripped
the cover from the coop, and the poor chickens were
fluttering away in every direction, being blown by
the wind until they looked like feather dusters without
handles. The bottom of the coop was made of thick
boards, so Dorothy found she was clinging to a sort
of raft, with the sides of slats, which readily bore
up her weight. After coughing the water out of her
throat and getting her breath again, she managed
to climb over the slats and stand upon the firm wooden
bottom of the coop, which supported her easily enough.
"You're
in a pretty fix, Dorothy Gale, I can tell you!"
"Why, I've got a ship of my
own!" she thought, more amused than frightened
at her sudden change of condition; and then, as the
coop climbed up to the top of a big wave, she looked
eagerly around for the ship from which she had been
blown.
 t was
far, far away, by this time. Perhaps no one on board
had yet missed her, or knew of her
strange adventure. Down into a valley
between the waves the coop swept
her, and when she climbed another
crest the ship looked like a toy
boat, it was such a long way off.
Soon it had entirely disappeared
in the gloom, and then Dorothy gave
a sigh of regret at parting with
Uncle Henry and began to wonder what
was going to happen to her next.
Just now she was tossing on the
bosom of a big ocean, with nothing to keep her afloat
but a miserable wooden hen-coop that had a plank
bottom and slatted sides, through which the water
constantly splashed and wetted her through to the
skin! And there was nothing to eat when she became
hungry—as she was sure to do before long—and
no fresh water to drink and no dry clothes to put
on.
"Well, I declare!" she
exclaimed, with a laugh. "You're in a pretty
fix, Dorothy Gale, I can tell you! and I haven't
the least idea how you're going to get out of it!"
As if to add to her troubles the
night was now creeping on, and the gray clouds overhead
changed to inky blackness. But the wind, as if satisfied
at last with its mischievous pranks, stopped blowing
this ocean and hurried away to another part of the
world to blow something else; so that the waves,
not being joggled any more, began to quiet down and
behave themselves.
It was lucky for Dorothy, I think,
that the storm subsided; otherwise, brave though
she was, I fear she might have perished. Many children,
in her place, would have wept and given way to despair;
but because Dorothy had encountered so many adventures
and come safely through them it did not occur to
her at this time to be especially afraid. She was
wet and uncomfortable, it is true; but, after sighing
that one sigh I told you of, she managed to recall
some of her customary cheerfulness and decided to
patiently await whatever her fate might be.
By and by the black clouds rolled
away and showed a blue sky overhead, with a silver
moon shining sweetly in the middle of it and little
stars winking merrily at Dorothy when she looked
their way. The coop did not toss around any more,
but rode the waves more gently—almost like a
cradle rocking—so that the floor upon which
Dorothy stood was no longer swept by water coming
through the slats. Seeing this, and being quite exhausted
by the excitement of the past few hours, the little
girl decided that sleep would be the best thing to
restore her strength and the easiest way in which
she could pass the time. The floor was damp and she
was herself wringing wet, but fortunately this was
a warm climate and she did not feel at all cold.
So she sat down in a corner of
the coop, leaned her back against the slats, nodded
at the friendly stars before she closed her eyes,
and was asleep in half a minute.
AFTERWARD: To
the delight of Oz fans, Dorothy will find herself washed
ashore in the land of Oz, reunited with her old friends
the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion.
In trying to rescue the Queen of Ev from the evil Nome
King, Dorothy and company will meet the Mechanical
Man, the Hungry Tiger, a talking chicken, and a princess
with 30 heads (one for each day of the month).
HAVE YOU READ: Here,
in the order in which Baum wrote them, are the Oz
books that are still in print (available from a variety
of publishers): The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz; The Marvelous Land of Oz; Ozma of Oz;
Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz; The Road to Oz; The
Emerald City of Oz; The Patchwork Girl of Oz; The
Little Wizard Series; and Tik-Tok
of Oz.
Please note: After Baum's death,
his wife contracted with several writers to continue
the series. None of those sequels came close to
matching the original wizard.
The entire text of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz is available from Recorded
Books (1-800-638-1304), as well as
through your local library. Two video versions
are also available: The Judy Garland musical, "The
Wizard of Oz," and the all-black musical, "The
Wiz."
 Fourteen
days before the battle of Wounded Knee,
an editorial appeared in the local press
urging an assault on the Lakota tribe: "Their
glory has fled, their spirit broken,
their manhood effaced; better that they
die than live the miserable wretches
that they are." How many of the
resulting 150 dead Indians could be attributed
to that editorial is pure conjecture
but a century later the writer's great-great
grandson devoted his master's thesis
to the subject of that editor's racist
views. The editor? L.
Frank Baum. Listen to NPR's "Oz
Family Apologizes." Also: the Indian-Oz
Connection. |
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Hey!
Listen to This
Three author profiles appear at this
site from
Jim Trelease's popular read-aloud anthologies,
Hey! Listen to This & Read All
About It!
including the remarkable background stories
missing from the dust jackets of their books.
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