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The Original OZ series

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the first of the Oz series. Originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago on May 17, 1900, it has since been reprinted numerous times, most often under the name The Wizard of Oz, which is the name of both the popular 1902 Broadway musical and the well-known 1939 film adaptation.

The story chronicles the adventures of a young girl named Dorothy Gale in the Land of Oz, after being swept away from her Kansas farm home in a cyclone. The novel is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success, and the success of the 1902 Broadway musical which Baum adapted from his original story, led to Baum's writing thirteen more Oz books.

The Oz books form a book series that relates the fictional history of the Land of Oz. L. Frank Baum went on to write fourteen full-length Oz books. Even while he was alive, Baum was styled as "the Royal Historian of Oz" to emphasize the concept that Oz is an actual place. The illusion created was that characters such as Dorothy and Princess Ozma related their adventures in Oz to Baum themselves, by means of wireless telegraph.

Lyman "L." Frank Baum (1856-1919) was an American author of children's books, best known for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen novel sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a host of other works (55 novels in total, plus four "lost" novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings). His works anticipated such century-later commonplaces as television, augmented reality, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), women in high risk, action-heavy occupations (Mary Louise in the Country), and the ubiquity of advertising on clothing (Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work).

Baum's avowed intentions with the Oz books, and other fairy tales, was to tell such tales as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen told, making them American and bringing them up to date by making the characters not stereotypical dwarfs or genies, and by removing both the violence and the moral to which the violence was to point. Although the first books contained a fair amount of violence, it decreased with the series; in The Emerald City of Oz, Ozma objected to doing violence even to the Nomes who threaten Oz with invasion. His introduction is often cited as the beginnings of the sanitization of children's stories, although he did not do a great deal more than eliminate harsh moral lessons. His stories still include decapitations, eye removals, maimings of all kinds, and other violent acts, but the tone is very different from Grimm or Andersen.


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  • 94 seiten

Sprache:

Englisch


  1. Die beliebtesten Kinderklassiker zu Weihnachten

    J.M. Barrie, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Charles Dickens, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Max Brand, George MacDonald, Johanna Spyri, Selma Lagerlöf, Carlo Collodi, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Else Ury, Agnes Sapper, Wilhelm Busch, Heinrich Hoffmann, Gerdt von Bassewitz, Lothar Meggendorfer, Hans Christian Andersen, ETA Hoffman, Brüder Grimm, Hermann Bote, Julius Wolff, Gottfried August Bürger, Elsbeth Montzheimer, Abbie Farwell Brown, Anna Sewell, Frances Browne, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    book
  2. Tik-Tok of Oz (Oz Series, Book 8)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook
  3. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (Oz Series, Book 7)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook
  4. The Emerald City of Oz (Oz Series, Book 6)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook
  5. The Road to Oz (Oz Series, Book 5)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook
  6. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (Oz Series, Book 4)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook
  7. Ozma of Oz (Oz Series, Book 3)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook
  8. 100 Amerikanische Klassiker - Meisterwerke, die man kennen muss

    Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Jack London, Stephen Crane, L. Frank Baum, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Elbert Hubbard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ambrose Bierce, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lew Wallace, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Norman Hall, Edgar Allan Poe, O.Henry, H.P. Lovecraft, James Fenimore Cooper, Edward Bellamy, Bret Harte, Max Brand, Zane Grey, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Margaret Mitchell, Henry James, Theodor Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Warwick Deeping, Thomas Wolfe, Harriet Beecher Stowe

    book
  9. The lost princess of Oz

    L. Frank Baum

    book
  10. Tik-Tok of Oz

    L. Frank Baum

    book
  11. The Patchwork Girl of Oz

    L. Frank Baum

    book
  12. The Marvelous Land of Oz (Oz Series, Book 2)

    L. Frank Baum

    audiobook