Introducing Young Readers to Oz & Other Classics

Librarian Lynette Armstrong Introduces Lyn to 5th Graders

It has been so much fun sharing Oz with fans, young and old.  However, with many young readers, the book is a surprise.  Their acquaintances with Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Lion is through the movie.

Librarian Lynette Armstrong invited 5th graders at her school to join a lunch time book club, and their first book was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  When she brought all of the 5th grade students to Forsyth Library on the Fort Hays State University campus, I hope I encouraged those who had read the first Oz book to consider reading more of the Oz series by L. Frank Baum, and perhaps to continue reading those books by Ruth Plumley Thompson and other authors that carry on the series, and for those who had not read the first book, perhaps I tempted them.

"I think I'd like to read that book."

I was delighted to hear from a friend who attended the events in Hays that his enthusiasm for Baum's book rubbed off on his young son.  He told me that he had tried unsuccessfully to interest his boy in an Oz book for young readers, but in telling his son about the events at FHSU, apparently something clicked, and during the boy's bedtime bath he told his dad, 'I think I would like to read that book.'  His father remembered how frightened of the flying monkeys he was as a child, and that just may have been an inherited trait, as his son didn't like the monkeys either!

Without the 1939 MGM movie, many children would never have heard of Dorothy and her trip to Oz.  Yet, why are they no longer discovering the book?  I decided to go online to explore why so many kids only know the movie.  After all, there continue to be new Oz editions with incredible illustrators like Charles Santore, Michael Hague, and Robert Ingpen.  Scott Gustafson's beautiful painting of the main characters is available as a jigsaw puzzle. Access to Oz for this generation of kids is still easy.

Dorothy by Charles Santore

I found a website called Common Sense Media with "50 Books All Kids Should Read by Age Twelve, but almost no children's classics were on their list.  Alice in Wonderland did make their list, as Alice did at another website with a specific list titled 'Our Favorite Classic Children's Books,' which included Alice, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and several newer classics, Golden Books, and European Fairy Tales, but no Baum.  I finally tried Wikipedia, and under 'List of children's classic books,' which is organized by centuries and then listed by year of publication, I finally found The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900 as the first listing under 20th Century.  If I were making my own list of recommended books for young readers, I would select a great many from years before 2000.

Hans Christian Anderson

In the 19th Century listing I noticed Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, first published in English in 1846.  Since L. Frank Baum said he wrote the Oz series to be the fairy tales of American children, why are young parents reading European Fairy Tales to their children and neglecting Baum's books?

Alice in Wonderland certainly deserves to be on book shelves of American children.  The original edition by Lewis Carroll was published in 1865, thirty-five years before Baum's in 1900.  While both Dorothy and Alice arrive unexpectedly in different lands and meet unusual characters, the author of The Real Oz, The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum, Rebecca Locraine, explained in an interview:  "...their similarities are, I think, only superficial...For me, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has always been far more direct and elemental, whereas the Alice books are more intellectual, and were less satisfying to me as a child."  So why omit Oz from modern recommended reading lists.  (See last week's post for reasons why adults should read Baum.)

From Carroll's original manuscript

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie was first published in 1911, eleven years after the first Oz book but during the time other books in the Oz series were being published.  Like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Barrie's book as been the subject of movies, animated and live action, yet it was included among current book recommendations while Oz was not.

In 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain was published, and like the other books already mentioned, it has been the subject of movies and other adaptations.  Other books written for young readers during the time Baum's Oz books were published are Anne of Green Gables by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1911, both of which have been adapted for films and television.  All three of these books remain popular.

Other popular books from the period, like The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908), and Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (first publically published 1902)  feature animal characters in a real landscape.  Christopher Robin, which was published in 1926, was based on a real child, author A.A. Milne's son Christopher Robin Milne, but the land in which he played with his friends was Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, and his friends were his actual toys brought to life by Milne.    

Cover Art of 1915 Edition

The six wonderful books mentioned in the two preceding paragraphs lack the supernatural fantasies of Baum's characters, but their publications and the times in which the fictional characters lived are during the period Baum's books were published.  Clearly, writing styles and settings from the past are bridges children easily cross.

I did not take a survey of the 5th graders to whom I spoke to see if they had read any of the books I have mentioned in this blog, so perhaps their familiarity with these books is also from movies and television.  Perhaps my blog should not be about disappointment that more young readers are not reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz but a broader regret that more young people are missing the delight of other great children's classics, and worse, those books are being ignored on recommended reading lists.

I have quoted Einstein before in this blog saying, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.  If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

Cover of 1st Edition

L. Frank Baum intended his stories to be American fairy tales, and his imaginative characters and their adventures would certainly seem to stimulate the minds of children in the same way as the European fairy tales Einstein recommended.

Author Gregory Maguire, a former professor of children's literature and well known for his four adult novels of the Wicked Years sequence,  inspired by Baum's books, was asked by an interviewer whether there is still a place for L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carrol, and the Brothers Grimm in our post-modern world.  

Cover of 1st U.S. Edition

Maguire replied:  "For adults, there is such a thing as post-modernism.  For children, there is only modernism--the here, the now.  Learning that the fairy tales, for instance, were largely maintained by an oral tradition and not collected until the 18th and 19th centuries, is a very adult understanding.  Kids don't know about what happened the year before they were born, much less what several centuries ago means.  Because of this peculiar limitation in children's understandings of time and culture, the fairy tales remain always news, always new.  And so do the works of great nonsense fantasists Lewis Carrol and L. Frank Baum.  That Dorothy doesn't instant-message her Best Friends Forever back in Kansas while her house is elevated by a tornado offers no confusion to young readers.  They take each story, and all its parameters, as mysterious givens.  So did we, in our time and place as children."

Gentleman Don

Regular followers of this blog may remember the fun series "Your Favorite Children's Books, 1-4 (March 26, 2015 through April 16, 2015) in which blog readers shared memories of their own favorite children's books.  One of my childhood memories was of a book titled Gentleman Don, published in 1910, long before I was born.  I loved it.  Many years later I located a copy online and ordered it.  Sadly, the Victorian style held far less appeal to me as an adult.  My experience reinforces the truth of Gregory Maguire's opinion that youngsters relate differently to stories, allowing their imaginations to eagerly slip into the text. 

Illustration by Robert Ingpen

I began this blog to encourage parents and grandparent to introduce the children they love to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The 5th graders I spoke to at the Forsyth Library certainly did not give me the impression they thought they were too old to read Oz.  I urge you to skip the reading lists for modern children for a while and consider Aesop's Fables from 600 B.C. or Robinson Crusoe from 1719.  Do you remember the fun of reading some of these 19th Century books, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), The Three Musketeers (1844), A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864),  The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), Black Beauty (1877), Heidi (1884), and Treasure Island (1883).  

Don't forget the 20th Century--Just So Stories (1902), The Call of the Wild (1903), Mary Poppins (1934), The Diary of Anne Frank (1947), Charlotte's Web (1952), The Borrowers (1952), To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and by all means, don't forget The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). 

Year's End

So much of 2011 has been spent with Isaac--first, completing the transcription of his journal after eleven months of looking over his shoulder at what he wrote every day from a distance of more than a century; second, reading old newspapers until I sometimes knew more about the people and events of Isaac's place and time than current goings-on in my own world; third, researching Isaac's neighbors until I knew the names of their children and their final resting places; fourth, discovering significant history about my home state and the nation that I had never learned; fifth, feeling that I was finally ready to begin writing Isaac's story; and sixth, introducing Isaac on the internet with my blog as I shared my adventures in researching and writing the book about Isaac B. Werner. [I Love History, 10/17/2011]

Before beginning this post, I went back to Isaac's entries on December 31st for each year of his journal, [Finding Isaac's Journal, 10/23/2011] thinking I would include his words about the closing of the year. In fact, those entries were no different from what he wrote every day of the year--weather, work to be done, his health--just another day. Apparently Isaac would have agreed with NYT journalist and author Hal Borland (1900-1978) who wrote: "Year's end is neither an end or a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us."

Rather than sharing Isaac's words about the closing of the year, I decided to share some of the comments followers of this blog have sent to me. At first, most of the e-mails I received were encouragement or brief expressions of delight with Isaac. "I love this stuff--here's to Isaac and his loquaciousness." M.C. Many of you described how you were connecting with things mentioned in the posts. "You write so well it feels lyrical. I savored every word. I stopped at the word commode--my grandmother used that term, and it came to life..." A.M. [Small Town Museums--Lucille M. Hall Museum, 10/29/2011]

I had no idea so many people loved cottonwood trees until I began receiving messages about that post. Among those who wrote: "I loved your piece on the cottonwoods and on the land. It's sad that once everything is bulldozed and leveled how hollow it all seems, and how much history and how many life stories are lost." J.Y. "How I loved to listen to the leaves when visiting the farm on vacation. I loved the belt lines of trees and was so disappointed to see so many dying when we went to the reunion. Hasn't history shown the need for those tree belts? The trees and their music are so soothing, as well as beautiful." N.H. "When my first husband and I built a home north of Slater, Missouri, I pulled up a cottonwood tree growing on the banks of the Mississippi River and replanted it in the yard so I could hear the clacking of the leaves. I loved it." L.K. I was naturally flattered when someone admired how I described the dying trees: "I enjoyed the cottonwood blog. I especially liked 'Today, many tree rows look like graveyards, the trunks of fallen trees bleaching white in the sun as aging neighbors await their turn to fall.' I know exactly what you are describing, and I cannot think of a better way to have done so." D.B. [Isaac Plants Cottonwood Trees, 12/2/2011]

When I mentioned in the post about Isaac's childhood in Wernersville, PA that his teacher, Francis Trout Hoover, had written a novel with characters and plot loosely based on Isaac's hometown, one of you who lives in that area told me that "Hoover wrote that book so close to the truth, that people in Berks County were angry and embarrassed, and they didn't want their 'history' getting out..." K.R. [Isaac's Birth & Childhood, 11/4/2011]

The tornado post, with a picture that included old boots on fence posts, drew this response: "The story was told that when a cowboy died his boots went up on the fence posts." A.M. [Isaac Sees 1st Tornado, 12/9/2011]

As more of you began to check the boxes at the ends of each post to let me know which ones you found particularly interesting and what you wanted to read more of, I was glad that so many of you enjoyed the political cartoons. Kansas was the center of the Farmers' Alliance and the political party that grew out of grass roots organizations formed by farmers and other laborers. Much of Isaac's Journal includes his political experiences and opinions. It is remarkable how many parallels there are between politics in the 1890s and today. [Politics Hardly Seem to Change, 11/24/2011]

When I mentioned some of my favorite illustrators of children's books in the post about Isaac and L. Frank Baum, I was delighted to receive e-mails from two of those illustrators. Michael Hague wrote, "I think it is important for the kids to value their creativity and imaginations and have people around them who are active in the arts and embrace it as an important part of their lives." Pop-up engineer and artist Robert Sabuda's animated tornado in his Oz book certainly drew excited Ohs and Ahs from the children. Sabuda wrote to me, "I love to see everyone enjoy my books. It makes the hard work worthwhile." [Isaac & the Wizard of Oz, 12/15/2011]

No post generated more enthusiasm among those of you who follow my blog than the one about disappearing traces of the past, and part of that was the impact of the photographs. "...so poignant and haunting. Those images and emotions speak to me as no other. I've always been that way, finding interest and increased curiosity toward the lonely, the forgotten, the lost." T.K.B. "Of the hundreds of reasons that houses might be left as you portrayed that house, surely one of them is that people live their lives until the end, but they don't 'finish' them as one might finish a skein of knitting." S.S. "I, like you, remember my grandfather farming and how all the homes have disappeared." J.R. "Just finished your latest blog. It makes me sad to confront what I already know about the familiar things we grew up with." A.B.C. "The older I get the more I miss what I had when I was a kid. That is life for most folks, I guess." R.B. [Disappearing Traces of the Past, 12/23/2011]

The encouragement and support that so many people, friends and strangers, have extended to me since I began this blog three months ago matter very much on a personal level, but I am especially pleased that what I am doing touches the feelings of many of you. Writing the blog has made me observe things that in my hurry to tend to business I was overlooking. It has enriched every day for me to practice the habit of seeing and reflecting, and I hope some of that has been transmitted to all of you.

Yesterday as my husband and I drove a road we've traveled hundreds of times, I saw an old house in a grove of dying cottonwood trees, and I had to have a photograph of it to share with all of you who loved the posts about cottonwoods and disappearing traces of the past. My husband, who generously tolerates my affection for another man--Isaac, of course--patiently turned around and went back so I could photograph the old house.

Thanks to all of you who are following my blog and who communicate with your checks in the boxes, clicks on +1, e-mails, and face-to-face encouragement. The comments at the end of posts are wonderful, and if you haven't been opening those, you might enjoy going back to read them, or adding comments of your own. Of all the wonderful responses people have shared with me, this simple statement sums up very well what I am trying to accomplish: "I feel like I knew Isaac!" D.K. I hope you will enjoy the future posts and will spread the word so more people can get to know Isaac too!!

Since Isaac did not provide me with a New Year's message to share, I will pass along the words of Benjamin Franklin: "Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man."

Isaac & "The Wizard of Oz"

For most readers, especially the children for whom L. Frank Baum wrote, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is as Baum intended, "a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out." In his Introduction for the book, Baum left little doubt about his intentions: "Folklore, legends, myths, and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous, and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations." However, Baum believed, "...the time has come for a series of newer 'wonder tales' in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale." Baum never outgrew his capacity for creative fantasy, and he believed it was important to encourage a child's sense of wonder and imagination.

Yet, as clearly as Baum stated his intention, adults have repeatedly imposed their own interpretations and ideas upon Baum's work. The 1939 movie has several minor changes, ruby rather than silver slippers being one example. The biggest change, however, was to begin the movie with a sepia-colored sequence at Dorothy's prairie home, with actors that were easily recognizable later in the movie as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wicked Witch. The movie, as wonderful as it is, declined to trust children's imaginations to accept that the tornado actually transported Dorothy to a real Land of Oz, suggesting instead that Dorothy's trip to Oz had only been a dream. While L. Frank Baum would surely have loved the movie, as so many generations of children already have, I suspect he would have been disappointed by the movie producers' decision to present Dorothy's visit to Oz as a dream.

So, why am I writing about L. Frank Baum and Oz on Isaac B. Werner's blog? One reason is to share how some scholars have gone even further in pre-empting Baum's fairytale for children. In 1954 a history teacher named Henry M. Littlefield suggested that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz could be interpreted as a parable of the Populist movement, using Baum's characters as stand-ins for people or places connected to The People's Party: the Scarecrow as the farmer; the Tin Woodsman as the industrial laborer; the Emerald City as Washington, D.C.; the Wicked Witch of the East as Eastern millionaires, monopolists, and bankers; and depicting the Populist opposition to the gold standard and belief in a return to bimetallism and renewed coinage of silver represented as the Yellow Brick Road misleading people toward reliance on the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers representing the untested power of returning to silver; and the Cowardly Lion as Populist (and Democratic) 1896 Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Littlefield's theories about the allegorical meanings of the book led others to propose their own historical and political interpretations, one of the most interesting being that the name of Oz itself came from the bimetallism ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold, suggesting to one scholar that Baum had used the abbreviation for an ounce as the name of the Emerald City.

Eventually, Michael Patrick Hearn, who is widely recognized as the leading scholar on L. Frank Baum and who authored the Introduction, Notes & Bibliography for The Annotated Wizard of Oz, weighed in on the debate with a letter to the New York Times, stating that he had found "no evidence that Baum's story is in any way a Populist allegory." A few weeks later, Henry M. Littlefield wrote a letter in reply, agreeing that "there is no basis in fact to consider Baum a supporter of turn-of-the-century Populist ideology." All of this makes an interesting connection between Baum and Isaac, and although Isaac died before the book was published, he was active in the Farmers' Alliance and supportive of Populist candidates.

A second reason is historical, since Dorothy's adventure begins on a farm on the Kansas prairie during the hard times Isaac described in his journal. While I agree with Michael Patrick Hearn that Baum intended to write a book for children and not an elaborate allegory about the populist movement and the election of 1896, I think it is natural that Baum was influenced by the events of his time. After the collapse of the Baum family's theatrical business, L. Frank Baum moved his family to Aberdeen, South Dakota to open a general store, but the hard times meant there were too few customers with money to purchase his goods, and the bank foreclosed on his store. He then purchased and ran a newspaper, which certainly made him familiar with the news of the day. It seems inevitable that some of what he saw around him would weave its way into his story.

Except for the fact that Isaac and some of his neighbors had planted trees on their timber claims and homesteads, Baum's fictional description of the Kansas plains on the opening pages of the book is not too different from what farmers in parts of Kansas might have seen during the years of drought in the late 1880s and 1890s. Baum wrote: "When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere."

The connection between Isaac's Journal and L. Frank Baum's Oz book was recalled to my attention as we prepared for a special event. The Macksville City Librarian, Jody Suiter, asked my husband and me to share our love of Oz with the K thourgh 5th grade students, and it was decided to use the larger space of the grade school library for the presentations. The picture at the right is of my husband handing out diplomas, signed by Oz and awarding each student a Degree of ThD (Doctor of Thinkology).

We had a wonderful time preparing for the day--baking cookies, making bookmarks, selecting which parts of the book to read to the students, printing diplomas, and choosing pictures from some of our favorite Oz illustrators to show them--Michael Hague, Charles Santore, W.W. Denslow, Robert Ingpen, Scott Gustafson, Robert Sabuda, and the unusual Lisbeth Zwerger. We decorated a tree with our collection of Oz ornaments, shared our one-of-a-kind Oz chess board with the 4th & 5th graders, told the story of Oz to the kindergarten & 1st graders with the help of hand-crafted Oz dolls, and compared how different illustrators imagined Oz in unique ways with 2nd & 3rd graders. In short, the innocence and enthusiasm of the students provided us with an afternoon of the very magic Baum wished for children when he wrote his stories, and through them, we experienced it too.

So, the movie makers can be forgiven for using artistic license to alter Baum's story for the screen, and the scholars can be humored for twisting Oz into a historical & political allegory, so long as children can still find magic in the Land of Oz as Baum intended.

(To see more pictures and information about our sessions with the children, visit Jody Suiter's wonderful website at http://macksville.mykansaslibrary.org/.)