Volume 3, Number 8 · December 3, 1964
Oz Country
By Marius Bewley
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
by Leo Marx
Oxford, 392 pp., $6.75
The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was
edited with two introductory essays by Martin Gardner, by Russell B. Nye
Michigan State, 208 pp., $3.75
The considerable imaginative achievement represented by the fourteen Oz books written by L. Frank Baum has been ignored for well over half-a century. Even those critics who have recognized their classic status have hesitated to approve their style; but Baum was always a satisfactory writer, and at his best his prose reflects themes and tensions that characterize the central tradition of American literature. Since he wished to create in Oz a specifically American fairyland, it is not particularly surprising that at first his writing was influenced by the comparatively new school of realists and naturalists. The description of the grimly impoverished Kansas farm of Dorothy Gale's aunt and uncle with which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) begins is a very good example of writing in this genre, but Baum soon moved on to more distinguished models in the same mode, and in at least one instance, surprising as it seems, he appears to have been strongly influenced by Stephen Crane.
Review, 2925 words
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