Littlefield linked the characters and the story line of the Oz tale to the political landscape of the Mauve Decade. In an ingenuous act of imaginative scholarship, Henry M. This view would change completely when an obscure high school teacher published an essay in American Quarterly claiming that Baum’s charming tale concealed a clever allegory on the Populist movement, the agrarian revolt that swept across the Midwest in the 1890s.

Is Oz, however, merely a children’s story, as its author claimed? For a quarter of a century after its film debut, no one seemed to think otherwise. Yet, as everyone knows, The Wizard of Oz is more than just another celluloid classic it has become a permanent part of American popular culture. With its stirring effects, colorful characters, and memorable music (not to mention Judy Garland’s dazzling performance), the film has delighted young and old alike for three generations. Though not a smash hit at the time of its release, The Wizard of Oz soon captured the hearts of the movie-going public, and it has retained its grip ever since. As fertile as his imagination was, Baum could hardly have conceived that his “modernized fairly tale” would attain immortality when it was adapted to the silver screen forty years later. Frank Baum in the introduction to his popular children’s story published in 1900.

“The story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to pleasure children of today” (Dighe 2002, 42).

Baum the wonderful wizard of oz