Last time, we left on our sick and despaired mister Baum, as he realized he could never kill the child of his mind and despite his best efforts, the Oz fan would NEVER LET GO.
So, he decided "What the hell... If they want Oz books, they'll get Oz books!". And so he wrote more, and more, and more Oz books. At least, Baum understood that, in effect, people literaly did not care about any continuity. They were just interested in A) seeing old characters return and B) having more inventions and new lands thrown at them. They were all about that nostalgia and worldbuilding, without any care in the world for any cohesiveness or continuity error. So Baum gleefully invented and added as much as he could and went full whimsical-worldbuilding in what is truly a chaos to piece together when you try to look at Oz as a cohesive fantasy.
However that's the thing with Oz: it is not a cohesive fantasy series. The first two novels were not meant to be serialized or have sequels, as such, when he started doing them, Baum was forced to change things. It is as early as the fourth book, "Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz", which I like to call "BIG RETCON - the book" because it was Baum's first time at doing a huge lore retcon conflicting what was said in earlier books. Many people like to oppose in terms of worldbuilding Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - but I do believe Tolkien's archnemesis would be L. Frank Baum, with C.S. Lewis standing in the middle of the spectrum. Baum was just as prolific in content and enormous in scope as Tolkien when it came to worldbuilding... but when you put all things side by side it literaly makes no sense unless you look at the outside reasons that forced Baum to change his lore every three books or so. You know, it was a different time, fictional lore wasn't even a thing...
From six Oz books we went up to FOURTEEN Oz books in total. The man literaly kept writing them until his death... The last of the Oz books Baum wrote was "Glinda of Oz", published in 1920. L. Frank Baum died in 1919 from a stroke - he had finished the last Oz book, but it was only published posthumously... Yes, we can say the power of Oz was so strong it survived Baum...
It actually DID survive though... In a way you might not expect.
There are many, many ways to "cut" the Oz book series. There is the "original trilogy". There is the "original six books". You can go with "the fourteen books Baum wrote". But for decades the dominating division went by an official title, used by both publishers and fan-circles around the USA... The Famous Forty.
Yes, you heard it right... Famous FORTY.
"But... but why are there FORTY Oz books if Baum only wrote FOURTEEN? It's a mistake in spelling right?"
No. There are FORTY Oz books that are considered "official" (I am not even getting in the non-official ones) by Oz canon. Well, only if you are not a purist who considers that only the books Baum wrote are Oz-canon and the rest are just fan-sequels (I am such a purist). It doesn't help that so far ONLY the books L. Frank Baum wrote are in public domain, the others are still under copyright law.
And why did we go from fourteen to fourty? Why... For money of course! It has always been the reason why Oz went beyond its original "stand-alone novel format". "Money makes the world go round" as the song says...
When Baum died, his publishers of the time, Reilly & Lee, started SWEATING. Because the Oz series was still their best-seller, their cash-cow, their sacred little idol... They couldn't JUST stop it there! They needed to have the series continue... And you know what they say in the editing world! "If you author dies... JUST REPLACE HIM!"
The idea of replacing Baum as the author of the Oz novel actually worked like a charm thanks to something Baum himself introduced... Baum, as the series was serialized, inserted himself as a character of Oz. More precisely he refused to present himself as an author or inventor, and when dealing with fan mail (literal mail, letters) or writing his prefaces, he presented hmself as "The Royal Historian of Oz". It was part of the fun game he had with children: he pretended the Oz novels were all official chronicles of what actually happened in Oz, and that it was his job to write them down. (That's also why he hoped the sixth book great finale of "Oz is cut off from the rest of the world" would work at killing the series, because "Oh well, I'm stuck in the USA, too bad I can't get in Oz anymore to write my... What? What did you say? THEY SEND RADIO BROADCASTS NOW?")
When it came time to replace Baum, the editors just went "Hey, so, a new Royal Historian was hired by the Crown of Oz! Don't worry, the chronicles of what is going on in this new land are still around!". That's how Ruth Plumly Thompson came in the picture.
Now, I am not as knowledgeable on the other "Oz Royal Historians" as Baum. As I said, I am kind of a Baum purist. But here's some of the few things I know...
Ruth Plumly Thompson, the second "official Historian of Oz" by the editors' system was a huge fan of Baum's work, and so she jumped on the occasion to write more Oz books. (There were even rumors at some point that Thompson was Baum's niece and thus that the Oz books was just a family business). The Oz books were her main source of income, and so she worked VERY hard at doing Oz chronicles: she published one book each year.
Ruth Plumly Thompson's way of doing Oz was VERY different from Baum. I can't list all of the differences, but most notably Thompson' stories were closer to the traditional European fairytales, while Baum had always tried to subvert traditional fairytale tropes or avoid fairytale cliches at the time to truly do something new and fresh (him having a GOOD WITCH in the first Oz novel was a HUGE thing in the 1900s America where all witches were by default evil). Thompson also favored male protagonists (Baum always was fonder of female protagonists for Oz), and she introduced a lot of romances and love stories - something Baum was STRONGLY against, because in his aesthetic children did not care about romance and romantic love had nothing to do in youth literature.
Thompson wrote 21 OZ BOOKS, yes, 21, from 1921 to 1976. Well, to be exact, she wrote 19 books in one swift series from 1921 to 1939, then took a long Oz pause, and wrote two additional Oz books in the 70s, but these two books are not considered part of the "Famous Forty". The last of these two was not even an Oz book originally but rewritten to fit an Oz novel - "The Enchanted Island of Oz", published the year of Thompson's death. [This tactic of taking a standalone fantasy novel for children, and reinventing it as an Oz book, had been used by Baum himself prior. His tenth Oz book, "Rinkitink in Oz", was originally its own thing, before he rewrote it as part of the Oz series, explaining why Oz only appears in the final chapters of this novel].
While most of these novels are just as forgotten, if not more obscure, than the many other Oz books Baum wrote, there is one element that tends to regularly pop up in Oz adaptations. Have you never wondered why the Good Witch of the North is sometimes called "Tattypoo"? (A name I personally HATE). The name appears for example in "The Muppets' Wizard of Oz", despite Baum never giving any name to the Witch of the North. Well, this was a Thompson invention! She was the one who named the Witch Tattypoo in her book "The Giant Horse of Oz", where she worked at giving a backstory to this character... a VERY divise backstory among Oz fans for many, many reasons too long to explain here.
Now, I said famous FORTY, and yet with Thompson's books added we only have 33 books.... What's the rest?
Three Oz books, "The Wonder City of Oz", "The Scalawagons of Oz" and "Lucky Bucky in Oz", were published in the early 1940s by John R. Neill, considered the third "Royal Historian of Oz". What is very interestng is that John R. Neill had worked on the Oz series for a very long time... since the very early Oz books in fact.
Everybody remembers the original illustrations for "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" - these were done by an artist named W. W. Denslow. It was the art where Dorothy is this chubby little brunette girl. Well, you might be surprised to learn Denslow only worked on this Oz novel. When Baum wrote the sequel, "The Marvelous Land of Oz", Denslow did not return. Rather John R. Neill entered the picture. He would become the "official" artist of Oz, illustrating not only all of the Baum books (except the first one), but also all of the Thompson books. And while he originally tried to match Denslow's style to make a smooth transition for the child audience, he quickly grew his own style - he notably was the one who brought to us a tall, thin, blond and fashionable Dorothy that is a far cry from the more "proper farm girl" Dorothy of Denslow. In fact, Neill's work as an artist does show in the way he writes Oz, as he has very cartoony ideas and works heavily with the visuals, so that the text can allow for cool-looking illustrations.
Unfortunately, the Oz curse strikes again: Neill died in 1943, the very year following the publication of his third Oz book. There was a fourth Oz books in the plan, that he had written the manuscript of right before his death: "The Runaway in Oz". However, Reilly & Lee refused to publish the unfinished work... We would have to wait until 1995 for this book to finally see the light of day: kept by Neill's widow, it was finally published by the house Books of Wonders, in a format edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower (another prominent Oz artist which we will have to talk about later).
Outside of these three main Historians, three more were recognized by the editors. Jack Snow, who in the late 40s published two "official" Oz books, "The Magical Mimics in Oz" and "The Shaggy Man of Oz". He also created an "official guide" called "Who's Who in Oz", but which was noted to have some inconsistencies with the books (which is expected given the Oz series is INCONSISTENCY - THE SERIES). There are a lot of rumors around of a third, unpublished Oz book by Snow called "Over the Rainbow to Oz", but nothing allows us to confirm the existence of such a book.
Rachel R. Cosgrove published one "official" Oz book in 1951, "The Hidden Valley of Oz". She had prepared in 1954 a second Oz book, called "The Wicked Witch of Oz", but Reilly & Lee refused to have it publish because, at the time, "Oz books didn't sell" (CRAZY, right? Now, in the mid-50s, Oz books didn't sell anymore?). She still managed to have it published in the 1990s, by The International Wizard of Oz Club (another beast we'll have to talk about).
Finally, the last official "Royal Historian of Oz" was Eloise Jarvis McGraw, but she wrote her only official Oz book in collaboration with Lauren Lynn McGraw, her daughter. Their work was "Merry Go Round in Oz". They created another Oz novel, "The Forbidden Fountain in Oz", but while it was published it was not included in the "canon" Famous Forty, and in 2000 Eloise Jarvis McGraw published a third Oz novel alone, "The Rundelstone of Oz".
And thus you have it! The Famous Forty. The Forty books Reilly & Lee, the official publishers of the Oz books, deemed, edited and sold as the "canon" Oz books.
... But of course, this being Oz, and the Oz books entering public domain in the 50s, 60s and onward, the Famous Forty as far from the only Oz books to exist. Oh no...
On one side, you have The International Wizard of Oz Club, which I talked about previously. From the 50s onward they worked as the second main publishers of Oz books, since Reilly & Lee had stopped doing Oz novels on the accounts that "it doesn't sell anymore". It was the Club that published the last two Oz novels of Thompson, and the fourth unpublished novel of Neill, and the rejected novel of Cosgrove, and the second book of the McGraw duo, and many others! They published 8 Oz works in total from 1958 (Jack Snow's short story "A Murder in Oz") to 2006 (Gina Wickwar's Toto in Oz).
To that you can add three Oz novels that were recognized as "official" by the Baum Family Trust. Two were written by William Stout, "The Emerald Wand of Oz" (2005) and "Trouble Under Oz" (2006) ; the last was by Kim McFarland, "Sky Pirates over Oz" (2014)
And I am not even talking about the many books written by several descendants of L. Frank Baum! Two of Baum's sons attempted doing Oz books: Frank Joslyn Baum, the eldest ("The Laughing Dragon of Oz", 1934) and Kenneth Cage Baum, the youngest ("The Dinamonster of Oz", written in 1941 but only published in 1991). However the most prolific Baum-related author is without a doubt Roger S. Baum. Great-grandson of the original author, he wrote FOURTEEN Oz books, yes as much as his great-grandpa, starting with "Dorothy of Oz" in 1989, and ending with "The Oz Enigma" in 2013.
And ALL OF THAT is not even accounting for all the non-official Oz authors and their many, MANY books... Go check the Wikipedia pages for the list of Oz books, or the many pages of the Oz Wiki, you will be impressed.
I wasn't lying when I was saying there were Oz bookS in plural...
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Well, you must know by now that L. Frank Baum ended up writing fourteen Oz book, forming a series starting in 1900 and ending in 1920. The thing is, Reilly &Lee, the publishing house of Baum, knew very well how successful and popular the Oz series was, and refused to let it die with its creator. They hired new authors that became âRoyal Oz Historiansâ and they were allowed to continue the Oz series â resulting in a total of forty âofficialâ and âcanonâ book forming the full Oz series, as published by Reilly & Lee.
After Baumâs death, the publishing house put the Oz series in the care of Ruth Plumly Thompson. She ushered the second Oz era, by writing 19 Oz books, starting in 1921 and ending in 1939. Ruth Thompson style is quite different from the one of Baum: most notably, she tried to turn the Oz world into a more âclassic fairytaleâ universe, by going a bit away from Baumâs innovations and novelties (for example, she turned the âNomesâ into âGnomesâ). Baum never had any male hero â Ruth had almost only male heroes. She was the one who introduced the most of the male protagonists of Oz, and she also had a greater focus on romance, weddings and royalty than Baum, a lot of her protagonists being princes and ending up married by the end of her novels. As a result, her books are quite controversial â for example, not everyone agrees with her decision to consider the Good Witch of the Northâs old age a âcurseâ brought to her by enemies, that needs to be lifted so she can leave her job as the benevolent magic ruler of a region to become the pretty princess married to the kind of a city. But her presence in the Oz landscape stays very strong.
While she stopped participating in the Famous Forty in the 30s, she ended up releasing two more Oz books in the 70s: âYankee in Ozâ in 1972, and âThe Enchanted Island of Ozâ in 1976.
By this point, there were 33 Oz books.
The next official Oz historian was John R. Neill. He actually had participated in the Famous Forty before â he was the official Oz illustrator. He started illustrating the books with Baumâs âThe Marvelous Land of Ozâ, taking over from W. W. Denslow, and he ended up illustrating all of Baumâs and Thompsonâs books. John Neill wrote three books for the Famous Forty, between 1940 and 1942: âThe Wonder City of Ozâ, âThe Scalawagons of Ozâ and âLucky Bucky in Ozâ. He actually had written a fourth Oz book for the Forty, but while he wrote it before his death he did not had time to illustrate it. The manuscript was however kept by his widow, and while not part of the Famous Forty, it was published in 1995, illustrated by Eric Shanower: âThe Runaway in Ozâ.
Neillâs take on Oz has been described as more⌠âmanicâ. Basically he had a children book illustratorâs mind when dealing with Oz, resulting in strong exaggerations â such as each quadrant of Oz being entirely of their associated color (from the sky to the skin color of people), or literally everything being alive in Oz, including houses.
After John Neillâs death, the next Oz Historian was Jack Snow. He was an avid fan of Baumâs writing as a child â in fact, when Baum died, Jack Snow offered to become the next Historian of Oz. It did not work, because he was only twelve years old at the time, but he ended up becoming the fourth Historian. He wrote two books for the Famous Forty: âThe Magical Mimics of Ozâ in 1946, and âThe Shaggy Man of Ozâ in 1949. It was rumored he had planned a third book, âOver the Rainbow to Ozâ, but no manuscript was ever found. Snow wanted to return to a sort of Baum âfundamentalismâ, by ignoring all the books of the previous Oz Historians and continuing right after Baumâs original books. Outside of his Oz writings, Snow was also a writer of ghost and horror stories for âWeird Talesâ, and he notably produced a very daring short story â âA Murder in Ozâ, trying to tie his two passions together by exploring the issue of the separate entities of Tip and Ozma. You must guess that the Oz editors refused to have such a story published, but it was eventually released by The Baum Bugle (the journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club, that started in 1957 and is still being published). Jack Snow also wrote âWhoâs Who in Ozâ in 1954, an extensive guide to all the characters in the Oz books. While the book was praised at the time and is still an important source of information, by now many have pointed several irregularities due to Jack Snow visibly misreading some of the characters (or simply losing track after reading 39 books in a row).
So, we are at a total of 38 books now. Only two were missing to form the Famous Forty.
The 39th book was written by Rachel R. Cosgrove: âThe Hidden Valley of Ozâ, released in 1951. She had written a second Oz book in 1954, âThe Wicked Witch of Ozâ, which tackled the issue of the missing Wicked Witch of the South, but she could not publish it, since Reilly & Lee considered the Oz books were not selling well anymore and wanted to close the series. The novel ended up however released by the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1993, illustrated by Eric Shanower. Rachel Cosgrove was notable for dismissing any kind of adult fan of Oz â she explained in the documentary âOz: The American Fairylandâ that she considered Oz to be a series for kids, that should not be enjoyed by adults.
The last book of the Famous Forty was âMerry Go Round in Ozâ, released in 1963, and written by a collaboration: Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw (mother and daughter). The two published another Oz book in 1980 (The Forbidden Fountain of Oz), while Eloise published on her own âThe Rundelstone of Ozâ in 2000.
There. These are the Famous Forty Oz book, the âcomplete official seriesâ.
After that, the International Wizard of Oz Club published several books: as I mentioned they published the books of Ruth Thompson that were not included in the Famous Forty, as well as âThe Forbidden Fountainâ of the McGraw duo and âThe Wicked Witch of Ozâ of Rachel Cosgrove.
To these already mentioned book you can add âThe Ozmapolitan of Ozâ, a 1986 book by Dick Martin ; and two books by Gina Wickwar, âThe Hidden Prince of Ozâ in 2000 and âToto of Ozâ in 2006.
Finally, The L. Frank Baum Family Trust authorized an author named Sherwood Smith to publish new Oz books, declaring them officially canon. With this authorization, Smith wrote a trilogy between 2005 and 2014: âThe Emerald Wand of Ozâ, âTrouble Under Ozâ and âSky Pyrates Over Ozâ.
These are all the books that could be considered âcanonâ.
Of course thereâs always one more; the âorthodox sequelsâ. Books that try their best to be sequels or continuations of the official Oz books and their canon, but were not officially recognized as canon. There are several of them, starting in 1985 with James Howeâs âMr. Tinker in Ozâ and ending with âA Nightmare in Ozâ, published in 2020 by David M. Keyes. A lot of them were made by members of Baumâs family, though there is a debate as to whether they should be considered âorthodox sequelsâ or rather âalternate Ozâ books, but thatâs for another time.
