THE AUTHORS OF A WICKED GOOD STORY

Gregory Maguire © 2005 Joan Marcus.

There are really two authors behind the story of WICKED: Gregory Maguire who wrote the novel of the same name and L. Frank Baum, who originally created the amazing land of Oz for the beloved classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Man Behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum

Long before children’s fantasy books such as The Chronicles of Narnia or the Harry Potter series, he kept the nation’s readers entranced with 14 novels about the land of Oz.

L. Frank Baum (he disliked his first name, Lyman) was born May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. He was the seventh of Benjamin and Cynthia Ann Stratton Baum’s nine children (only five of whom survived to adulthood).

Born with heart problems, Baum was in poor health for most of his life. Forbidden to play outdoors, he developed a love of reading and an active imagination. He later wrote:

Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams – daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery wizzing – are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.

For his 14th birthday, Baum was given a small printing press; he started his own neighborhood newspaper as well as several hobby magazines.

As a young man, Baum fell in love with his cousin’s roommate at Cornell, a young woman named Maud Gage. Against the wishes of her mother (a prominent activist for women’s rights), they were married on November 9, 1882.

Baum was always a supporter of equality for women. In fact, the majority of the main characters in the Oz books were girls: Dorothy, Princess Ozma, Glinda, Betsy Bobbin, Trot and the Patchwork Girl. As one character remarks, “Girls are the fiercest soldiers of all…They are more brave than men, and they have better nerves.”

In 1887, Baum’s father died; a clerk had gambled away most of Benjamin Baum’s fortune, leaving the Baum family in financial straits. Baum moved to the Dakota Territory with his wife and young children, and opened “Baum’s Bazaar” in 1888, where he would spin tales to the children who came to buy ice cream. Persistent drought brought hard times, and the store went bankrupt. Baum then ran a weekly newspaper, the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, which also failed.

After moving to Chicago, Baum worked as a reporter and traveling salesman. He wrote his first children’s book, Mother Goose in Prose, which was a moderate success. His next attempt, Father Goose: His Book, became the best-selling children’s book of the year.

In 1898, he was telling a story of a Kansas girl’s adventures in a magical land to his children and their friends. When one of the children asked what the place was called, he replied: “The Land of Oz.” He may have formed the idea from the label on a filing cabinet drawer, labeled O-Z.

His wife encouraged him to write down the story. Originally the book was called The Emerald City, but the publishers superstitiously believed that a book with a jewel in the title would not sell well. Retitled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book was published on May 15, 1900 and became a best-seller.

When Baum changed publishers, they asked for another Oz book. He wrote The Further Adventures of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, which was published as The Marvelous Land of Oz in 1904.

Known to his fans as the “Royal Historian of Oz,” Baum moved his family to “Ozcot,” a new home in Hollywood, California, where he hoped the climate would be good for his failing health. He wrote many other children’s stories under various pen names, while continuing to write Oz books—sometimes based on suggestions from his young readers.

Baum tried to end the Oz series with the sixth volume, The Emerald City of Oz, in which Dorothy brings Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to live with her in Oz. However, the demand for more Oz stories was so great that at last he relented, and wrote a new Oz book every year.

Baum suffered a stroke and died May 6, 1919 at Ozcot. His last book, Glinda of Oz, was published posthumously in 1920.

Gregory Maguire – The Author of WICKED, the Novel

The novel upon which WICKED is based in a complicated piece of literature officially titled Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of West by Gregory Maguire.

Maguire was born in 1955, in Albany, New York. He was a voracious reader who particularly enjoyed fairy tales, even when he was at an age when one should have outgrown them. “There was something about fairy tales – the way that they existed in a no-man’s-land of time and history – that was oddly compelling to me.”

By the age of eight, Maguire was writing his own works, creating hundreds of stories, plays, songs and poems. He decided to pursue a career as a writer by the time he was in college. His book The Lightning Time, a novel for children, was published when he was 23. He wrote more books for children while he was a grade school teacher, and later, as a college professor. He taught at The Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College from 1979 to 1986; in 1990 he received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University.

While continuing to write children’s books, he searched for an idea for a novel for adult readers. Knowing that writers of children’s fiction often have a difficult time making the jump to writing for adults, he wanted to wait until he had a strong idea for a story:

I became interested in the nature of evil, and whether one really could be born bad. I considered briefly writing a novel about Hitler, but discarded the notion due to my general discomfort with the reality of those times. But when I realized that nobody had ever written about the second most evil character in our collective American subconscious, the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought I had experienced a small moment of inspiration.

Driven partly by inspiration and partly by financial necessity, Maguire began to write Wicked. “I could see the time was growing ripe, and that if I didn’t do it, somebody else was going to have that very good idea and do it – possibly, or probably, better than I could.”

Published in 1995, Wicked was very well received by critics and readers, although some Oz purists were resistant at first to Maguire’s “heretical” story. Maguire is careful to point out that Wicked is technically not a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, but rather a “reimagining” of the same world.

Maguire has applied the same reimagining technique to other well-known tales in his subsequent novels: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister sets the Cinderella story in 17th century Holland; Lost intermingles parts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with the story of Jack the Ripper; and Mirror Mirror places the tale of Snow White in Italy at the time of the Borgias.

And how did he feel about the large “reimagining” that had to be done from his novel to the stage musical adaptation?

I knew that people would be coming to my novel remembering the 1939 movie. I didn’t even need to refer to it much. I could evoke the film with very slender, oblique comments. But I wasn’t beholden to it. And why should WICKED the musical slavishly conform to my novel, when my novel itself was a playful deviation of the original Baum novel, with glancing references to the movie? I had no problem with Stephen [Schwartz] and Winnie [Holzman] taking the material and making it their own. I have a big ego, but it’s not that big: Let WICKED the musical be different than Wicked the novel. With my blessing.