The Wizard of Oz (Puffin Classics) - L. Frank Baum [1]
That is another wonderful thing about a great story like this: it changes all the time with the readers it finds. No child today will imagine Dorothy with pigtails as she is portrayed in my first edition, but however you imagine her it will still be Dorothy, a character as immortal as a printed page can grant.
But why exactly is this story a great story? I am tempted to say you should find out for yourself, as I believe that every reader finds another story between the pages of a book. If you don’t like it, it is often not the story that is to blame, just the fact that it was not the right one for you. The better a story is, the more readers will find themselves in it — and each one will find something that seems to be there especially for him or her: a certain episode or character, sometimes a sentence, that gives us the words for something we always knew, but never had the words for.
Yes, that’s what storytelling is all about: word fishing -and giving birth to characters from these words.
When we remember a story, what do we remember most? The story itself or its characters? Don’t these characters sometimes follow us through all our lives like good friends? That’s another kind of magic a great story can weave. The Wizard of Oz will make you meet three quite unforgettable characters. Your own beating heart will suddenly remind you of the Tin Woodman, who so desperately longs to have such a heart. Each scarecrow you see in a field will make you ask yourself whether this one would also like to walk away to find a brain. And every lion’s roar will remind you of the Cowardly Lion, who touched your heart in the kingdom of Oz. This is another thing a great story can do: it adds another reality to the one we see. It weaves another story into our own story and makes them all one — as they probably are anyway.
So, open the book and start travelling through the pages. It will be quite a journey, and you won’t come back the way you started, which is true for all journeys, especially written ones. Accept the invitation of the printed letters and step into the strange land of Oz. And if you are luckier than me, you’ll go there while you are still a child.
This Book is Dedicated
To My Good Friend and Comrade
My Wife
Contents
l The Cyclone
2 The Council with the Munchkins
3 How Dorothy Saved the Scarecrow
4 The Road Through the Forest
5 The Rescue of the Tin Woodman
6 The Cowardly Lion
7 The Journey to the Great Oz
8 The Deadly Poppy Field
9 The Queen of the Field Mice
10 The Guardian of the Gates
11 The Wonderful Emerald City of Oz
12 The Search for the Wicked Witch
13 The Rescue
14 The Winged Monkeys
15 The Discovery of Oz, the Terrible
16 The Magic Art of the Great Humbug
17 How the Balloon was Launched
18 Away to the South
19 Attacked by the Fighting Trees
20 The Dainty China Country
21 The Lion Becomes the King of the Beasts
22 The Country of the Quadlings
23 Glinda Grants Dorothy’s Wish
24 Home Again
1
The Cyclone
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor, and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty-looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar — except a small hole, dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing