[In the following excerpt, Riley discusses the last four Oz books and their significance to Baum's development of his fairyland Oz.]

For, after all, dear reader, these stories of Oz are just yours and mine, and we are partners. As long as you care to read them I shall try to write them.

—L. Frank Baum, “To My Readers” in The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

L. Frank Baum's life was an unusually eventful one that took him across the entire breadth of America, but the wandering had not been the result of free choice on his part. Without the reversals he and his family suffered in the early 1880s, he would most probably have been content to remain in Syracuse, New York. There are, however, absolutely no indications that he ever regretted the last move to California. With the comfortable and spacious home that he named Ozcot and his large garden in which he grew prize flowers and kept a flock of chickens, just as he had when he was a boy,¹ Baum was at last able to re-create some of the grace and serenity of his lost Rose Lawn.

It was good that he had the peaceful haven of Ozcot because the work and worry involved with the Oz Film Manufacturing Company had done great harm to his always fragile health. The problems with his heart became more severe; he developed the painful tic douloureux in his face; and he began having severe gall bladder attacks.² In fact, he wrote the promised new Oz book, The Lost Princess of Oz, while he was in continual pain.³ It was in the introduction to that book that for the first time he implied that he was content to give up his hopes of writing other kinds of fantasies and continue to add to the Oz series: “As long as you care to read them I shall try to write them.”⁴

The last four Oz books are unusual in that, with the exception of only two chapters in one of the stories, they are set entirely within the borders of Oz, almost as though Baum, having reconciled himself to writing only Oz fantasies during the time left to him, wanted to explore that fascinating fairyland more extensively himself. There are good things in each of these four books, with few obvious traces of Baum's physical suffering and the sometimes difficult conditions under which he wrote them. They are also more consistently plotted than some of the books immediately preceding them, and there is a sense that, at last, the Oz series had Baum's undivided attention, that these fantasies were conceived as Oz books and not as springboards for or adaptations of stage or movie plays. It may be symbolic of this central position that the Oz series had now attained in Baum's creative life that The Lost Princess of Oz is the first (and the only) of his Oz books to open in the Emerald City, the very center of his fantasy world.

THE LOST PRINCESS OF OZ

Baum had always acknowledged his debt to his readers for their encouragement and suggestions. He had written in the Introduction to The Emerald City of Oz: “Perhaps I should admit on the title page that this book is ‘By L. Frank Baum and his correspondents,’ for I have used many suggestions conveyed to me in letters from children.”⁵ That “collaboration” probably became even more important to him when his health problems made it more difficult for him to work, and he admitted that the basic idea for his Oz book for 1917, The Lost Princess of Oz, was suggested by an eleven-year-old girl who said, “I s'pose if Ozma ever got lost, or stolen, ev'rybody in Oz would be dreadful sorry.” And Baum noted, “That was all, but quite enough foundation to build this present story on.”⁶

One morning in the Emerald City, Dorothy cannot find Ozma. No one has seen her, and when her friends try to look in the Magic Picture to find their ruler, they find the picture also gone. The mystery deepens when in the Quadling Country, Glinda discovers that her Magic Record Book, one of the treasures of Oz, and all her other magic implements have been stolen. Later the Wizard is dismayed to find his magic bag of tools also missing.

These are, however, not the only important thefts that day. Far away at the southern tip of the Winkie Country in the hitherto unknown Country of the Yips (which does appear on the 1914 map), Cayke the Cookie Cook discovers that her golden, diamond-studded dishpan has been stolen, and without it, she cannot bake the delicious cookies she is known for. (The dishpan has other magic properties that she knows nothing about, but Baum does not explain what a dishpan has to do with baking.) In the Country of the Yips also lives a frog the size of a man who dresses in splendid clothes and has convinced the people that he is the wisest being in the world. Cayke begs his help, and seeking a wider audience for his imagined magnificence, he agrees to go with her out into Oz to try to find the dishpan.

In the Emerald City, Ozma's friends decide to search Oz in all directions for some trace of her. The group that goes to the Winkie Country consists of the Wizard, Dorothy, Betsy, Trot, Button-Bright, the Patchwork Girl, the Cowardly Lion, Betsy's mule Hank, the Sawhorse, and Toto. They soon learn from a shepherd about a part of the Winkie Country that is wild and unknown and that might harbor wicked people. It seems possible that Ozma might be hidden in such a place, so they set off in that direction. In quick succession they encounter the Merry-Go-Round Mountains, spinning rubber hills; a disconcerting revolving landscape; and the City of Thi, where the Thists live. These last are strange creatures with diamond-shaped heads and heart-shaped bodies who eat thistles, use mechanical dragons for transportation, and are ruled by the High Coco-Lorum. The searchers learn nothing of Ozma there, but do hear about the unnaturally strong people living in the next city.

The next day, between the cities, they find an orchard with all kinds of fruit trees to supply food for their breakfast. Button-Bright loses himself, as is his wont, and he finds the only peach in the orchard. It has a golden pit, and he is told by a Bluefinch that it is an enchanted peach placed there by someone called Ugu the Shoemaker.

Button-Bright is found again, and the group next comes to the city of the Hercus, who are ruled by Vig, the Czarover. These people are immensely strong because their leader feeds them zosozo, which is a form of energy. They are excessively thin, frail-looking people, but they are served by giants who fear their masters' great strength. It is here that the rest of the group from the Emerald City hear about Ugu the Shoemaker and learn his history: how he was descended from a long line of magicians, how he discovered and studied their magic books, and how he left the city of the Hercus and built himself a wicker castle. It seems to everyone that Ugu is the most likely person to have stolen Ozma.

The scene shifts to the journey of the Frogman and Cayke and details the events of their journey, which include a dip in the Truth Pond for the Frogman that cures him of his arrogance and conceit, a ride with a sullen ferryman, and the discovery of a small kingdom of bears in the forest. The encounter with the ferryman sheds interesting light on Baum's respect for wild creatures. The ferryman cannot understand what the Frogman or any other animal in Oz says, and his speech to them is only meaningless sounds. The man's condition is punishment for deliberate cruelty to animals. He is sorry for what he did, but he must live forever cut off from the animal kingdom. His cruelty has destroyed the bond of communication.

The adventure in the forest is longer and more developed. This area of the forest called Bear Center is populated by stuffed teddy bears. Their king is the Big Lavender Bear, who is able to produce illusions of real people and objects just as the Magic Picture does and who possesses the wind-up Little Pink Bear, who will give the true answer to any question put to him about the present or past. By the magic of the Big Lavender Bear, the Frogman and Cayke learn that it was Ugu the Shoemaker who stole the dishpan. Having become interested in their situation, the king and his Pink Bear decide to accompany them on their search for Ugu.

Both parties are now approaching each other, and the next morning they meet and join forces, not far from Ugu's wicker castle. Like many of Baum's villains when they are threatened, Ugu tries to block the rescuers' way with magic obstacles that, with the Wizard's knowledge, they are able to overcome until they enter the castle and the very room where Ugu is. He has, however, one last trick, and he turns the room upside down, making them prisoners.

This time they are saved by Dorothy, who in secret had been practicing with the Nome's King's Magic Belt. She turns the room right side up and transforms Ugu into a dove. Unfortunately, before they can find out what happened to Ozma, Ugu escapes in the golden dishpan; its magic property is that it will transport anyone to anyplace in Oz in an instant. With the help of the Pink Bear, Ozma is discovered imprisoned in the golden peach pit in Button-Bright's pocket, and they are all able to return to the Emerald City, happy at the success of their mission—all, that is, except Cayke, who pines for her dishpan.

The story has a happy ending when the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow find the dishpan in the Quadling Country and bring it to the Emerald City. Ugu also appears in the city and asks forgiveness for his evil ways. He refuses to be turned back into his old shape, since he knows that he makes a better dove than he ever did a man.

Having Ozma kidnapped and her friends search for her was a good idea that enabled Baum to use a large number of his main characters. With each book he had added new characters to Ozma's court until, by this time, he had an almost unwieldy permanent cast, and his readers expected the most prominent ones, at least, to make an appearance in each new story. He also had developed the settled part of Oz into a peaceful and, above all, safe place to live where the inhabitants are protected from outside harm by Ozma, the benevolent Glinda, and the Wizard, as well as by various magical implements such as the Magic Picture, the Magic Record Book, and the Nome King's Magic Belt. Thus it was a problem to build a story that would include many of the main characters and could somehow sidestep all the magical aids he had created to protect them. The idea of having Ozma stolen allowed him to do just that.

He made Ozma's kidnapper, Ugu, an unlawful magician who is ambitious to be the most powerful magic worker, as well as the ruler, of Oz. To that end, Ugu steals not only Ozma, but also all the magic tools in the country, with the exception of the Nome King's Magic Belt, which was not originally from Oz. Thus having reduced the magic in Oz to the level of that in the first two books, Baum was able to separate his cast of permanent characters into four different groups, one to search each of the four countries of Oz. His story follows only one group, but it is a large one comprising fourteen beings at the end!

Probably because Baum had to manipulate such a large number of characters, the journey is a bit lumbering at the beginning, and some of the adventures, though interesting, seem to have no purpose other than to introduce strange and unknown inhabitants of Oz. However, this may result from there being no indication that the search party is even going in the right direction until Chapter 11. Also, the first hint of who might be the villain is not given until the same chapter. And it is not until Chapter 19 that the connection between the kidnapping and the theft of the magic instruments is revealed. The reader knows that the group of searchers including Dorothy and the Wizard will be the successful one, but the first half of the book has the feel of wandering in the dark with no clear goal in sight. Perhaps, though, the story's major problem within the context of the series is the climactic rescue. In previous books, Baum had developed the Magic Belt into the most powerful magic tool in Oz, and it is unsatisfactory to have it so conveniently introduced at the end and to have Dorothy seem unfamiliar with its powers. She had both captured it and used it in Ozma of Oz.

Baum's treatment of Oz in this story is quite satisfactory, however. The map of Oz he had drawn, while eliminating the flexibility he had utilized in the earlier books to fit the country to his stories, had the effect of causing him to treat Oz in a more consistent manner. There are no major changes or reinterpretations of that fairyland in The Lost Princess, but there are several refinements.

In view of what happened to Oz after Baum's death, it should be mentioned again that he did not indiscriminately sprinkle the landscape of Oz with odd characters and settlements. He had already stated that there were many unknown parts of Oz around the edges of the country, and in The Lost Princess, he is quite specific about the location of the strange peoples and places the travelers come across:

The settled parts of the Winkie Country are full of happy and contented people who are ruled by a tin Emperor named Nick Chopper, who in turn is a subject of the beautiful girl Ruler, Ozma of Oz. But not all the Winkie Country is fully settled. At the east, which part lies nearest the Emerald City, there are beautiful farmhouses and roads, but as you travel west you first come to a branch of the Winkie River, beyond which there is a rough country where few people live, and some of these are quite unknown to the rest of the world. After passing through this rude section of territory, which no one ever visits, you would come to still another branch of the Winkie River, after crossing which you would find another well-settled part of the Winkie Country, extending westward quite to the Deadly Desert that surrounds all the Land of Oz and separates that favored fairyland from the more common outside world.⁷

It is in the “rude section” between the rivers that the adventures of the story take place. Note also that in the text, Baum placed the Winkie Country in its correct location in Oz.

A refinement Baum made that adds greatly to the sense of place in this story is the inclusion of a map showing the section of Oz containing the Winkie Country with the routes of the travelers and the strange places they visit marked on it. Baum had learned from his readers' letters how successful the maps in Tik-Tok of Oz had been, and he sent his publisher a “Map of the Search for the Lost Princess” to use in this book.⁸ That map, combined with the precise textual descriptions, gives the reader a definite sense of sharing a journey in a recognizable country.

A further refinement in this story was to make it certain that the ruler of Oz, Ozma, is no ordinary girl. She is now definitely “a powerful fairy.”⁹ He had made that change in The Scarecrow of Oz, but the repetition of it several times in The Lost Princess makes it clear that the change was intentional, although the fairy powers she possesses are not mentioned.

THE TIN WOODMAN OF OZ

The constant pain that Baum endured while writing The Lost Princess finally forced him to consent to an operation in December 1917 to remove his gall bladder and appendix. He survived the operation, but it further damaged his heart, and it soon became apparent that he would never again be well enough to leave his bed.¹⁰ Despite all this, he worked on his Oz book for 1918, The Tin Woodman of Oz. Perhaps he found solace by escaping from his limited environment into that safe and happy world his imagination had created.

His readers' comments also provided the inspiration for this book. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Tin Woodman explains how his love for a Munchkin girl led to his ax being enchanted and to his becoming a man of tin with no heart.¹¹ Many of Baum's readers had asked him what had become of the Munchkin girl, and Baum constructed his new story to answer their questions.

The search for the Munchkin girl, now given the name Nimmie Amee, is initiated by a young wanderer called Woot who stops at the castle of the Tin Woodman to ask for a meal. After hearing the histories of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, Woot asks what became of the girl, and the Tin Emperor decides that it is his duty to find her and make her Empress of the Winkies.

Woot and the Scarecrow accompany the Tin Woodman, who, because of the personal nature of the mission, decides that the travelers will avoid the Emerald City on their way to the Munchkin Country. By doing so, they are forced to pass through a wild and unknown part of the Gillikin Country where they have some interesting and some unpleasant adventures. They first encounter the City of Loonville, where the inhabitants are rubber balloons. These strange creatures are not friendly, but they pose little danger because they are so easily punctured. The group's next adventure has more serious consequences. They meet Mrs. Yoop, the wife of the captured Yoop from The Patchwork Girl and herself a giantess. At first she seems pleasant, but she is a Yookoohoo, which Baum explains is “an Artist in Transformations,” and that makes the travelers uneasy. She shows her true nature when she transforms the Tin Woodman into a tin owl, the Scarecrow into a bear stuffed with straw, and Woot into a green monkey. They then learn that their old friend Polychrome has also been captured and changed into a yellow canary.

The prisoners are able to escape by stealing the magic apron that allows Mrs. Yoop to open and close the doors of the castle, but their troubles are not over for they are threatened by a jaguar in the forest and Woot is chased by a dragon family hoping to make him their dinner. Because of their transformations, they decide to delay their quest and go south to ask Glinda for help in regaining their true forms. They first stop at Jinjur's ranch, which is nearby, and there they meet Ozma and Dorothy. Ozma is able to come to their rescue and in an exhibition of magic unlike anything she has before displayed, she restores them to their normal shapes so that they are able to continue their original mission.

Back in the Tin Woodman's native forest in the Munchkin Country, they find a rusted Tin Soldier very like the Tin Woodman, and, after oiling his joints, they are surprised to hear that his history is similar to the Woodman's. He, too, fell in love with Nimmie Amee and had his sword enchanted by the Wicked Witch of the East so that it cut off parts of his body until he was made entirely of tin. He also feels that it is his duty to find the girl, but she no longer lives in the forest. Further surprises greet the travelers when they visit the tinsmith and hear that, having discovered some magic glue at the witch's lair after she had been destroyed by Dorothy's house, he made a man out of the cast-off human parts of the two tin men. The tinsmith is able to tell them that Nimmie Amee now lives near the desert border of the Munchkin Country near Mount Munch. After more adventures that include a journey through an Invisible Country, encounters with a gigantic beast called a Hip-po-gy-raf and a family of educated pigs, and a trip through a rabbit hole, the searchers finally locate her. Both the Tin Woodman and the Tin Soldier are dismayed and shocked to find Nimmie Amee happily married to the composite man made by the tinsmith from their body parts!

The Tin Woodman of Oz shares the structural problems that are more or less common to all the books (except Rinkitink) in the latter part of the series. These stories often depend too strongly on series of brief, undeveloped adventures among communities of strange creatures to fill out the plot, and the result frequently is that the narrative thread is lost for a time. Baum had a genius for inventing exotic and wonderful fantasy places; the problem was that sometimes his imagination ran away with him. The way he exercised that ability in the last part of the Oz series played a part in changing the way we view Oz itself. This tendency to let his invention run free is noticeable in Baum as early as the journey to the south section in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but inside his premier fairyland, he kept it under better control until his return to Oz in 1913. It is true that Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz are little more than tours through odd and magical countries, but those countries are outside Oz. They add to the geography of the fantasy world that Oz is a part of, but they also point out the uniqueness of Oz within that world. Oz remains in those books very much like the real world, not a magical country but a country in which magical things may exist or happen. Magic is still the exception, not the rule.

In the latter part of the series, Baum poured his inventive ability into Oz, bringing Oz closer to the spirit of his early, totally fantastic country of Mo, and thus lessening its reality. It should be remembered, though, that Baum now had no other outlet than the Oz series for his imaginative countries, and the fact that he funneled all his creative energies into Oz may be another indication that he had become reconciled to his readers' preference for Oz stories above his other types of fantasies.

Baum was also, in the latter half of the series, more inclined to use magic to extricate his characters from awkward situations and to help them overcome obstacles. In the first six books, Glinda is the principal source of good magic in Oz, and her magic is limited. In the last eight books, magic workers, magic implements, and the use of magic increase enormously.

All these problems appear in The Tin Woodman of Oz, but the basic plot is stronger and more inventive than those of the books surrounding it. Part of the story's appeal lies in the look back at, and continuation of, events in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but its main significance here comes from the fact that it presents Baum's last major reinterpretation of Oz.

When the Tin Woodman recounts his history, Baum added more details, but in the main, he was faithful to the original version given in The Wizard, except that now the evil woman for whom the girl was a servant was actually the Wicked Witch of the East. This change allowed the girl to gain her freedom when the witch was destroyed. The Tin Woodman's return to his old home in the forest sparked Baum's imagination to some of his most original and disturbing flights of fancy, which have a modern sense of the absurd about them. In a cupboard at the tinsmith's shop, the Woodman finds a head that, being the head of an Oz man, is very much alive and carries on a conversation with him. The most bizarre part of the incident is that it is the Tin Woodman's own head, which his enchanted ax had cut off long before. The episode creates some interesting confusion about identity, that is only increased when the Tin Woodman and the Tin Soldier meet the composite man, who was created out of parts of them both.

Such incidents would have been impossible in Oz as it was originally created in The Wizard, but changes such as making its inhabitants immortal in The Road to Oz had opened the way for all kinds of paradoxical situations. Baum's readers had not been slow in spotting those paradoxes and inconsistencies, but far from being hurt by their criticisms and questions, he welcomed and encouraged them. (It would be interesting to know how many future literary scholars got their first experiences with textual criticism from the Oz books.) It is probable that the description and reinterpretation of Oz that Baum inserted into The Tin Woodman was his way of answering some of those questions.¹² His readers were asking for the internal logic that George MacDonald believed must be a part of successful fantasy.¹³ Oz in The Wizard has that consistency, as it does in many of the other books if taken individually. But the series had now progressed through eleven books, and the cumulative picture the reader built up over the course of them began to look much less consistent. Baum was not able to rewrite the series and bring everything into line, but he could present a new version of Oz history to answer some of the most pressing questions.

The principal problem he addressed was the immortality of the inhabitants, and while repeating what he had said in The Emerald City, that no one died or was sick in Oz but that in rare instances a person could be destroyed, he went on to deal with the American characters: “Another strange thing about this fairy Land of Oz was that whoever managed to enter it from the outside world came under the magic spell of the place and did not change in appearance as long as they lived there.”¹⁴ And he went even further and explained how it all came about and why people of all ages existed in Oz:

Oz was not always a fairyland, I am told. Once it was much like other lands, except it was shut in by a dreadful desert of sandy wastes that lay all around it, thus preventing its people from all contact with the rest of the world. Seeing this isolation, the fairy band of Queen Lurline, passing over Oz while on a journey, enchanted the country and so made it a Fairyland. And Queen Lurline left one of her fairies to rule this enchanted Land of Oz, and then passed on and forgot all about it.

From that moment no one in Oz ever died. Those who were old remained old; those who were young and strong did not change as years passed them by.¹⁵

This new version of the origin of Oz solves many problems. Baum was able right away to explain that the Wicked Witch of the East is destroyed by Dorothy's house because “she was very old and was all dried up and withered before Oz became a fairyland.”¹⁶ But it also created new problems.

It probably seemed fitting to Baum that since Oz had developed into such a splendid fairyland, it should be ruled by an exceptional being such as a fairy, but by making Ozma one of Queen Lurline's band, he had to discard her whole history as it is presented in The Marvelous Land and repeated with variations in several of the subsequent books. He had, though, prepared the way by mentioning in two of the later books that she is a fairy. Firmly established as “a real fairy,”¹⁷ Ozma also becomes a magic worker as powerful as Glinda and the Wizard in The Tin Woodman of Oz, and she demonstrates her ability when she transforms the travelers back to their original forms.

However inconsistent this new version of Oz may be with those presented from The Road on, it is more logical than the others and is satisfying in that it draws Oz closer to the source of power and home of the fairies, the Forest of Burzee. Baum obviously confused Zurline, the Queen of the Burzee Wood Nymphs, and Lulea, the Queen of the Fairies, when he wrote Queen Lurline.¹⁸ Unfortunately, even before he became an invalid, Baum seems to have trusted too much to his own memory for names and incidents in his previous stories.

Besides being a more logical version of Oz history, it is an ingenious one. Baum's physical condition forced him to work more slowly on this story than was his custom, and the extra time he had to think about it is apparent. He also seems to have had time to consider his too-large cast of characters, because at the end of The Tin Woodman, he sends Woot out to wander happily again and the Tin Soldier to a post in a faraway part of the Gillikin Country; neither settles in the Emerald City.

THE MAGIC OF OZ

In the introduction to his next book, The Magic of Oz (1919), Baum mentioned his “long and confining illness” when apologizing to his readers for not answering all their letters. It is amazing that Baum, despite his physical condition, could continue to create magical, happy books about Oz; but for him, his whole life long, living had meant creating—to stop would be to die. What is even more amazing is that his stories actually begin to improve again until they reach a level, though not as high as his best works, of which he could rightfully be proud. The Tin Woodman of Oz meanders a bit, but the level of invention is high. The Magic of Oz depends heavily on some of the earlier stories for its plot, but it dispenses with the travelogue and is much more tightly constructed, using double and sometimes triple plots.

The first of those has the Nome King, Ruggedo, appearing as the deposed king of the Nomes he becomes at the end of Tik-Tok, but again, just as in The Emerald City, he plans to try to conquer Oz. To do this, he enlists the help of a discontented boy, Kiki Aru, from Mount Munch in the Munchkin Country who has learned a secret word that will effect any kind of transformation. The Nome King's plan is to go to the wild forest area of the Gillikin Country, transform the animals into men, and use them as an army.

The other main plot refers back to The Road to Oz, which brings Dorothy to Oz for Ozma's birthday. In The Magic of Oz, it is again almost time to celebrate the ruler's birthday,¹⁹ and Dorothy and Trot are trying to discover unusual presents to give to Ozma. Trot and Cap'n Bill hear about a Magic Flower that grows on an island in a river near the northern border of Oz and to the east of the forest where the Nome King intends to raise his army. Led by the Glass Cat, they go to the island but find that the island is also magic because they take root there and become prisoners.

Dorothy and the Wizard, for their gift, decide to go to the forest in the Gillikin Country to ask some of the monkeys to come to the Emerald City and perform for Ozma and her guests. Accompanied by the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, Dorothy and the Wizard arrive in the forest just as the Nome King and Kiki Aru are rallying the animals, but after a struggle involving much magic, the Wizard manages to defeat them in time to rescue Trot and Cap'n Bill from the magic island.

In the same manner as in The Emerald City, the Nome King and Kiki Aru are rendered harmless by drinking from the Fountain of Oblivion, which makes them forget all their evil ways. Baum, perhaps feeling that this might be his last book, gave the now harmless little Nome a home in Oz “where he was quite content and passed his days in innocent enjoyment.”²⁰

The book's climax is Ozma's birthday banquet, at which the whole cast of familiar Oz characters is assembled. This banquet, however, pales in comparison with the glittering celebration that Baum created for The Road to Oz. It consists only of the members of Ozma's court, but that court has grown so numerous that it is a large party even without the splendor afforded by foreign visitors.

The Magic of Oz is aptly named, for magic abounds in it. What all the new mechanical inventions were doing for people in America, magic was doing for the people of Oz. Indeed, for the good of the story, magic is almost too abundant; it touches almost every aspect of the adventure, except transportation. If food or lodgings are needed while traveling, the Wizard supplies them, or if no path is found in a dense forest, the Wizard's magic ax cuts one. The ultimate effect is that the sense of wonder is actually lessened because magic becomes the norm. Baum was, in a sense, competing with the actual world, and by increasing the magic in his fantasy world, he may have been trying to keep the interest of his readers, who were exposed every day to the new technological wonders of the real world.

Despite the addition of even more magic, the land of Oz remains unchanged from the version presented in The Tin Woodman. The adventures again take place among the inhabitants of wild and unknown parts of the country, but Baum explained: “Still, these unknown subjects are not nearly so numerous as the known inhabitants of Oz, who occupy all the countries near to the Emerald City. Indeed, I'm sure it will not be long until all parts of the fairyland of Oz are explored and their peoples made acquainted with their Ruler.”²¹ The frontier in Oz was disappearing as quickly as that in the United States.

It is outside Oz that Baum added some refinements to his world. Only a little more than two chapters of this story do not take place in Oz, but that section is important because it demonstrates that even this late in Baum's career, when he knew that he would never again write other kinds of fantasy, he still viewed his many past creations as part of only one large and varied imaginary world.

When Kiki Aru, high up on Mount Munch on the eastern edge of Oz, discovers the magic word that will cause transformations, he changes himself into a hawk so that he can fly out of Oz over the Shifting Sands (the name of the desert on that side of Oz) to escape detection by Glinda and Ozma for illegally practicing magic. Once he is across, Kiki Aru visits in quick succession Hiland, Loland, Merryland, Noland, Ix, and Ev, where he meets the Nome King. Except for the stop in Ev, these visits are in no way necessary to the story; their sole function seems to be to highlight the interlocking nature of the fantasy countries of Baum's imagination.

In Ev, the boy has trouble getting food because he has no money, “for in the Land of Oz they do not use money at all.”²² By this device, Baum made it clear that in his mind his alterations to Oz do not extend to his other imaginary countries, despite the fact that they surround Oz. He thus emphasized still more that in his continent of the imagination, Oz is quite different and very special.

GLINDA OF OZ

The Magic of Oz did not turn out to be Baum's last fantasy; he was able to finish Glinda of Oz (published in 1920), the best of the last four Oz books. The level of invention is very high; no unnecessary incidents impede the narrative; and the plot grows naturally out of the background as it had evolved in Baum's last major revision in The Tin Woodman.

The story concerns Ozma's attempt to prevent a war between the Flatheads and the Skeezers, two hitherto unknown tribes of people who live near the northern border of Oz. The Flatheads live on the top of a mountain and are a strange race whose heads are flat just above their ears where their brains should be; however, all carry a can of brains given to them by the fairies who made Oz a fairyland. They are ruled by the Supreme Dictator, who has stolen the canned brains from several of his subjects and has become a sorcerer. The Skeezers are normal-looking people who live in a beautiful island city in a lake near the mountain of the Flatheads. The city is enclosed by a large glass dome, and their Queen Coo-ee-oh, a powerful and cruel Krumbic witch, has constructed marvelous, magical machinery by which she can submerge the glass-domed island in the lake in times of danger.

Ozma and Dorothy's mission of peace fails when they are unable to persuade the two rulers to acknowledge the authority of Ozma and to obey the laws of Oz forbidding fighting and unlawful magic, and they are taken captive by Queen Coo-ee-oh. The Skeezer queen submerges the city before the first engagement with the Flatheads, and Dorothy and Ozma's plight becomes more serious when Coo-ee-oh, having left the city by a submarine boat, is defeated and transformed into a jeweled swan by the Supreme Dictator of the Flatheads. They and the rest of the Skeezers are prisoners in the submerged city because as a swan, Coo-ee-oh has lost all memory of the magic words needed to raise the city and work the machinery of the boats and the bridge.

The focus of the story now shifts from conflict to rescue as all of Ozma's counselors (most of the familiar Oz characters), led by Glinda, rush to the lake of the Skeezers to attempt to rescue the ruler of Oz and Princess Dorothy. Glinda and the Wizard are aided by three girls, Adepts at Magic, who had been the original rulers of the Flatheads before being transformed into fish by Coo-ee-oh and who had been restored to their proper shapes by Red Reera the Yookoohoo (a mistress of transformation like Mrs. Yoop). At first, even the combined knowledge of these magic workers is unsuccessful, but after the water level of the lake is lowered enough to allow them entrance into the city through the top of the dome and after the machinery is examined, they find the proper way to operate it, and the city is raised.

A new queen is chosen for the Skeezers, and after the Supreme Dictator is deposed, the three Adepts at Magic are restored as rulers of the Flatheads. Glinda causes the heads of these strange people to assume the normal shape, with the brains inside instead of in cans. Both the Skeezers and the Flatheads, now renamed Mountaineers, pledge loyalty to Ozma and the laws of Oz.

Just as in The Magic of Oz, Baum made no major changes to his fairyland in Glinda of Oz, which may indicate that in his mind, his premier fairyland had reached its final stage of development; certainly the plot of Glinda grows naturally out of all that has gone before. The area occupied by the Skeezers appears on Baum's 1914 map, and the Flatheads are cleverly linked to Baum's final version of the history of Oz by the gift of canned brains from Queen Lurline and her fairy band. That unlicensed magic is unlawful in Oz and that it is Ozma's duty as ruler to enforce the law had been established as far back as The Patchwork Girl (1913), but until this book, Ozma has not been directly involved with the far-flung parts of her realm. There are indications that if Baum had been able to write more stories, there would have been more plots involving Ozma settling disputes and extending her benevolent rule to all the undiscovered corners of Oz. Baum has Ozma say, “It is my duty to be acquainted with every tribe of people and every strange and hidden country in all Oz.” And Dorothy replies, “Time doesn't make much diff'rence in the Land of Oz … so, if we explore one place at a time, we'll by-an'-by know all about every nook and corner in Oz.”²³ What Ozma intends is to become acquainted with the far-flung areas of her realm; she says nothing about civilizing or changing those regions.

In the series, Oz was being explored in a way that resembled Baum's own experience with America. At the time of The Wizard in 1900, much of this country, especially the Far West and the Deep South, were unknown to him. But as the series progressed so did Baum's acquaintance with the United States, until he had traveled to almost every major section.²⁴ The parts that were still unknown to him were, like Oz, the areas around the edges and certain other wild and inaccessible parts within the country. There was also a correlation between Oz and Baum's America in Ozma's goal of extending the benefits of her rule to all parts of Oz. During his lifetime, he had seen the western United States become more fully explored and the western territories brought into full equality with the rest of the union as states. However, one cannot escape the conclusion that the benefits of Ozma's rule would be more unobtrusive and natural than what was done in the name of civilization in Baum's America.

Glinda of Oz, named for the supreme sorceress of Oz, contains a greater number and variety of magic workers than any of Baum's other stories: besides Glinda, the Wizard, and Ozma, there are the Supreme Dictator, a sorcerer; his wife, a witch; Coo-ee-oh, a Krumbic witch; the three Adepts at Magic; and Red Reera, the Yookoohoo. Yet this proliferation of magic is not the flaw that it is in several other of the books because Baum seems to have recognized the problem, and he set limits on the magic and brought order out of the confusion.

The magic of the fairies depends on “the secret laws of nature” and is “granted them to bring comfort and happiness to all who appeal to them.”²⁵ Ozma is “the most powerful fairy in Oz,” but other fairies have powers different from hers, and Glinda and the Wizard are more powerful still.²⁶ When Dorothy confidently asserts that Ozma will understand the magic machinery of the Skeezer island, Ozma disagrees, “I'm afraid not, my dear. It isn't fairy magic at all; it is witchcraft.”²⁷

Red Reera is a Yookoohoo and thus is restricted to magical transformations, but the magic of the other magic workers (sorceress, sorcerer, witches, wizard, and adepts) utilizes “chemicals and herbs and … tools,”²⁸ and therefore the extent of their powers depends on the intelligence, diligence, research, and experience of the various individuals. Coo-ee-oh “had a rare genius for mechanics,”²⁹ and her machines that control the island are unfamiliar to Glinda and the Wizard and difficult for them to comprehend.

Baum thus divided the magic workers in his Other-world into two groups representing nature (fairies) and science (wizards, witches). Because it comes from nature, Ozma's fairy magic is inherently good and cannot be perverted (there are no evil fairies in Baum's stories), yet the magic of the other magic workers is, like science, neither good nor bad, but depends on the moral nature of the person wielding the power. Both Glinda and the Wizard are good people, and their magic is good; the Supreme Dictator is evil, as is his magic; the three Adepts at Magic are good, but their magic instruments are perverted to evil use when stolen by Coo-ee-oh.

This dichotomy illustrates Baum's attitude toward nature and science throughout his career. To him, nature was inherently good, but the technological advances of science were no better or worse than the people controlling them. At times, he appears to have adopted a negative attitude toward the scientific and technological innovations that were changing his America, but it was not the innovations themselves he distrusted—they were fairy-tale wonders to him. He distrusted the ability of himself and the rest of his generation to use them wisely and unselfishly “for the good of the world.”³⁰ Baum put his faith in the children. He devoted his adult career to them and tried to open their eyes to the natural wonders of the world and to develop their imaginations by giving them a real “American” fairyland, in the hope that they would learn to use the magic of the modern world wisely to enhance nature and not destroy it.

THE LAST JOURNEY

L. Frank Baum did not live to see the publications of his last two Oz books. About Glinda of Oz, Martin Gardner wrote, “I have often fancied that the sunken island on which Dorothy was trapped beneath a lake was an unconscious expression of Baum's own sinking emotions.”³¹ In that context, the great array of magic workers whom Baum assembled in his story to try to raise the island would also take on new meaning. However, doctors in the actual world are human and not magic workers. Baum died in May 1919 at Ozcot in Hollywood. For much of May 5, he was unconscious, but he rallied in the evening and talked to Maud for a little while before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Early on the morning of May 6, he spoke one more sentence before dying. It is reported that what he said was, “Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.”³²

At the end of Glinda of Oz, Baum left his characters in the sunshine of a summer's day on their way back to the Emerald City. We, his readers, can easily follow them there in our minds because we know what to expect; the brilliant and sparkling City of Emeralds is as familiar to us as our own native city or town. The little Guardian of the Gates will be there to welcome them, just as he did when Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion made their first journey to see the Great Oz, and the people of the city will turn out to celebrate the safe return of their adored ruler, Ozma, and the beloved little girl from far-off Kansas who is now their Princess Dorothy. And all the members of the rescue party will also receive hearty welcomes and cheers.

While the celebration and rejoicing are taking place, perhaps we, with the bird's-eye view possible to us, will rise above the activity, seeing the jeweled city set amid green meadows dotted with wild flowers and, farther out, the neat well-kept farms of the rural countryside. Then, as we continue to rise, we will catch a glimpse of the glittering tin castle in the west and the glowing ruby palace in the south; dark forests and mist-shrouded mountains will come into view, many containing areas and peoples still unknown. Soon the whole, vast, rectangular-shaped country, with its four distinct kingdoms and the jeweled city in the center, will be laid out before us. We will then see the rosy-tinted Barrier of Invisibility, which protects this favored land, and, beyond that, the added protection of the desert, with its shifting sands and noxious gases.

But we must rise even higher because there is more to be seen. Ringed around the desert border of Oz are other countries: the magical Valley of Mo, with its happy and contented people; the twin kingdoms of Hiland and Loland, where a gingerbread man is king; the seven Valleys of Merryland, with their clowns, newborn babies, candy people, and fairy wax-doll queen; the Happy Valley, where Santa Claus works to make children happy; the mystical Forest of Burzee, where the fairies have lived since the world began; the kingdoms of Noland and Ix, where King Bud is learning to become a good ruler and where Queen Zixi remains radiant and young in the eyes of her subjects; the Land of Ev, with its handsome royal family; and the merry kingdom of Rinkitink, which is washed by the purple waters of the Nonestic Ocean. And still there is more to be seen because the whole fantasy continent is now spread out before us. We may notice an island in the sky hovering about this world or the strange and unusual islands that dot the ocean; we may see some of the Sea Fairies sporting on the white-capped waves; and we may remember stories of the long-ago enchanted Island of Yew, which disappeared from this magical world. We will also observe other countries surrounding Oz, and in particular, we may notice one, the Kingdom of Dreams,³³ that the author did not live to write about. However, we know that this whole marvelous and varied continent lapped by the waves of an unknown sea is a Kingdom of Dreams and that it all came out of the imagination of one man: Lyman Frank Baum.

The growth and evolution of Baum's imaginary Other-world has now been traced from its beginning with the Valley of Phunnyland (Mo) and the little Dorothy who hears a marvelous story from a rabbit through its final manifestation in Glinda of Oz. It was neither an orderly nor a completely planned development, and so many unanticipated and extraliterary factors played parts that it is a wonder that the development was not more chaotic than it was. That Baum's tying together of his various imaginary countries was not totally unplanned is evident from the links and references among such diverse books as A New Wonderland, American Fairy Tales, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and Queen Zixi of Ix; even John Dough and the Cherub contains subtle references to other Baum stories. Oz, however, was the unexpected element in Baum's plan.

Oz was actually discovered first by children. When Baum's creative energies were set in motion with the phenomenal success of Father Goose, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was to him only one of the great variety of stories that poured out of his imagination. It was his young readers who first recognized the uniqueness and fascination of that marvelous land. It was not a place his readers wanted to visit only once; they wanted to go there again and again. At first, Baum mistakenly attributed the continued success of the book to the success of the stage version, and he wrote a second book about Oz more in hopes of another stage triumph than from a desire to develop Oz further. In the meantime, he continued to develop his fictional world in his own way without reference to Oz. One can imagine that he was somewhat bewildered when the success of the second Oz book, the utter failure of its stage adaptation, and the less than overwhelming success of his other fantasies finally forced him to realize that, of all his creations, Oz held supreme place in the affections of his readers.

It was a dilemma. The original story had not been constructed to have a sequel, and the “sequel” he did write was intended as the basis of a stage musical and only confused the matter of Oz. What he finally did was to develop Oz slowly and to focus most of the attention on Dorothy's journeys to that land, because he had realized that, to his readers, Oz was the beautiful, wished-for place and not the slightly sinister land of illusion he had originally conceived.

In his fifth book about Oz, Baum drew that country into his existing imaginary world, which included Merryland, Burzee, Ix, and the rest of his other countries, and he affirmed the supreme position of Oz in that world by having his characters from those other fantasies honor the ruler of Oz. Also in that book, he began the transformation of Oz into an ideal world by removing both money and death from that favored country, and he continued the process in his sixth book, where, probably because he thought he was ending the series, he felt free to give his most detailed description of the organization and nature of that fairy society. It is likely that Baum still did not completely grasp the power and reality that his imaginary world held for his readers. He thought that by bringing Dorothy to Oz to live and by cutting that fairyland off from the rest of the world, demand for more Oz books would cease, but it was not Dorothy's journeys to Oz that his readers wanted. They wanted more about Oz itself.

Baum's attempt to leave Oz and write about new imaginary places was short-lived, and once Oz became his only outlet for his imaginary creations, he poured them into this existing Other-world, exploring more and more odd corners of it. He also organized his entire Other-world by drawing maps that showed how Oz related to all his other fairy countries, and he revised the history of Oz to link it with his earlier fairy mythology and give his marvelous land an appropriate ruler. By the end of his life, he had created the most spectacular and detailed fantasy world to come from the pen of an American writer.

The question is: Why Oz? Why did Oz capture the imaginations of his readers? The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not the only good story he wrote. Many people maintain that Queen Zixi of Ix is a better book, and the myth-tinged imaginary world in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is certainly richer than Oz as that country was first conceived. The most generally accepted answer is that the uniqueness and appeal of Oz lie in its American quality. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Baum put more of his own experiences in The Wizard than in any of his other fantasies. Dorothy's travels in Oz are his own travels in America: from the East to the frontier of the West, to Chicago, and to the southern extent of his sales territory. He was himself an exile far from home, and the country that Dorothy discovers is America seen by Baum and transformed by his imagination. His readers recognized before he did that Oz is an authentic American fairyland, that it is a place—unlike the German forests of the Brothers Grimm or the English Wonderland of Lewis Carroll—that can be just over the hill or beyond the prairie in this land of limitless possibilities.

Even when Baum began to develop Oz, it did not lose its American qualities, and that development reflects Baum's own increasing experiences with the United States, sometimes in a negative way as when he made Oz not what America is, but what it could be. At times, the development of Oz was erratic and confused, but so was the development of America. Edward Wagenknecht wrote, “It would be comparatively simple to make the history of Oz a somewhat more highly finished record, but the chances are nine out of ten that you would at the same time make it somewhat less American.”³⁴

Baum's imaginary world passes the primary test of successful fantasy: his imaginary continent, with Oz set in its center, is an authentic and recognizable Other-world. In a very real sense, however, Baum's total Other-world exists outside his books and stories because it is a composite of all the facts and scraps of information—the “introductory interiors”—contained in his whole body of work. It is in this way that Baum's creation most resembles Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. The character of Holmes, as it is built up over the course of the stories about him, ultimately forms a whole that exists in no one of them and, in fact, exists quite apart from the stories. It is the same for Oz. There is no one book the reader can go to that contains the totality of Baum's Other-world; that exists quite apart from the books. The “existence” that these creations have outside the narratives in which they figure is what makes them such real, living entities that actually seem to have a life apart from their creators. Sherlock Holmes is still solving cases long after Doyle's death; every year sees the publication of new Holmes stories by various writers. The same is true with Oz; that marvelous fairyland continues to be explored and mapped in new books and stories. Baum's Other-world did not die with him.

Notes

1. Frank Joslyn Baum and Russell P. MacFall wrote that “his blooms won so many awards in strong competition in that land of flowers that he was often described as the champion amateur horticulturist of Southern California” (To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz [Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1961], 22, 268).

2. Ibid., 270.

3. Ibid., 271.

4. L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1917), [14].

5. L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1910), [7].

6. Baum, Lost Princess of Oz, [14].

7. Ibid., 57-58.

8. David L. Greene, “L. Frank Baum's Later Oz Books: 1914-1920,” Baum Bugle 16 (Spring 1972): 19. Greene quotes a letter of 6 September 1916 from Baum to his publisher: “You will find a ‘Map of the Search for the Lost Princess,’ which I would like to have redrawn and printed in black-and-white and placed in the fore part of the book.”

9. Baum, Lost Princess of Oz, 20.

10. Baum and MacFall, To Please a Child, 273.

11. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with pictures by W. W. Denslow (Chicago: Hill, 1900), chap. 5, 58-61.

12. L. Frank Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1918), 156-58.

13. George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” in The Gifts of the Child Christ: Fairytales and Stories for the Childlike, edited by Glenn Edward Sadler (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973), 1:23-24.

14. Baum, Tin Woodman of Oz, 157.

15. Ibid., 156.

16. Ibid., 207.

17. Ibid., 158.

18. For another possibility, see Ruth Berman, “Lurline's Source,” Baum Bugle 26 (Autumn 1982): 2-3.

19. L. Frank Baum, The Magic of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1919), 240-41. Baum explains why Ozma, now a fairy, celebrates her birthdays:

    It seems odd that a fairy should have a birthday, for fairies, they say, were born at the beginning of time and live forever. Yet, on the other hand, it would be a shame to deprive a fairy, who has so many other good things, of the delights of a birthday. So we need not wonder that the fairies keep their birthdays just as other folks do, and consider them occasions for feasting and rejoicing.

20. Ibid., 266.

21. Ibid., 55.

22. Ibid., 30.

23. L. Frank Baum, Glinda of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1920), 36.

24. According to Scott Olsen, “[Baum] did manage to make major trips to the south and west in 1903 and 1904” (“The Coronado Fairyland,” Baum Bugle 20 [Winter 1976]: 2n).

25. Baum, Glinda of Oz, 56, 141.

26. Ibid., 27, 58.

27. Ibid., 139.

28. Ibid., 37.

29. Ibid., 264.

30. L. Frank Baum, The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, illustrations by F. Y. Cory (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1901), 237.

31. Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957), 40.

32. Baum and MacFall, To Please a Child, 274-75.

33. On the 1914 maps, Baum included places inside and outside Oz that had not yet appeared in his published stories. The Kingdom of Dreams was the only one of those places that he failed to incorporate into subsequent stories.

34. Edward Wagenknecht, Utopia Americana (Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1929; reprint, n.p.: Folcroft Press, 1970), 40.