Volume 24, Number 15 · September 29, 1977
The Wizard of the 'Wizard'
By Gore Vidal
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
To Please a Child
by Frank Joslyn Baum, by Russell P. MacFall
Reilly and Lee
The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was
edited with two introductory essays by Martin Gardner, by Russell B. Nye
Michigan State University Press
The Oz Scrapbook
by David L. Greene, by Dick Martin
Random House, 182 pp., $10.00
Wonderful Wizard Marvelous Land
by Raylyn Moore, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury
Bowling Green University Popular Press, 213 pp., $4.50 (paper)
'I have just seen a number of landscapes by an American painter of some repute,' wrote John Ruskin in 1856; 'and the ugliness of them is Wonderful. I see that they are true studies and that the ugliness of the country must be unfathomable.' This was not kind. But then the English of that day had no great liking for the citizens of the Great Republic. Twenty-four years earlier Mrs. Trollope had commented without warmth on the manners and the domestic arrangements of United Statesmen (or persons, as we must now, androgynously, describe ourselves). Twelve years earlier Charles Dickens had published Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens had found the American countryside raw. The cities ramshackle. The people grasping, boastful, even—yes, dishonest. This was not at all kind. But then how could these British travelers have known that in a century's time the barbarous republic beyond the western sea would not once but twice pull from the flames of war (or 'conflagration' as they say in California) England's chestnuts?
Review, 4801 words
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