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). 

Writing for Children

Isaac B. Werner believed in educating children as the best hope for their own improvement and for the nation.  He helped build the country school and often made repairs on his own, just to keep the school, its grounds, and the out buildings in good condition.  He also shipped some of his own books to his young nephew back in Pennsylvania.  Although he never had children of his own, he cared about young people.

Among the list of responsibilities suggested by Neil Gaiman were two suggestions for writers of books for children; however, I think both suggestions are good advice to teachers and parents.

First, he urged that writers recognize "...an obligation to our readers...to write true things...not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages...not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding babies."

Collection of Fairy Tales from several countries

That advice should be heeded by those of us buying books for children.  I love to give nursery rhymes as baby gifts, and I love fairy tales.  Have you really paid attention to these rhymes and stories?  They are tough stuff!  What did the old lady who lived in the shoe with too many children  do?  "She gave them some Broth without any bread; She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed."  And poor Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel!  Frog in "Wind in the Willows" is always getting into trouble.  Charlotte the spider dies.  Yet, children read these traditional tales and identify without being traumatized.  They recognize the hardships of Black Beauty and cry, and as Gaiman says, they learn empathy and finish reading slightly changed.  Classic stories for children include the realities of life, without sugar-coating or slamming children with it, and through literature they become better equipped to deal with life's challenges.

Too many modern books for children are heavy handed in delivering these messages, or they don't give children enough credit for figuring out the lessons without preaching or explaining the lessons for them.  Not everyone loves nursery rhymes and fairy tales as I do, but there are also modern classics whose authors have avoided preaching, lecturing, and moralizing.  It is our responsibility as teachers, parents, librarians, and friends to find the modern classics that kids will enjoy and cherish.

Scott Gustafson, Robert Ingpen, & Kinuko Y. Craft

Second, "...to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we've lessened our own future and diminished theirs."  The same advice applies to those of us who buy books for children, or who make trips to the library a regular part of their lives and who fill our homes with books.  (See last week's blog, "Responsibilities Toward Building Literacy," 12-22-2016" and "Literacy Then and Now," at 12-8-2016 for more of Neil Gaiman's wisdom.)

Although Gaiman does not address the importance of children's book illustrators, I believe illustrators are equally important in developing a taste for the arts.  Three of my favorite illustrators are Scott Gustafson, Robert Ingpen, and Kinuko Y. Craft; however, there are so many incredible illustrators that I could name, working in a variety of styles.  Recently, the style of children's book illustrations has shifted away from the fine artists I admire toward more cartoonish drawings.  In my opinion, children see enough flashy, cartoon-like pictures on TV and in advertisements without having that sort of imagery in their books, especially when there are fine artists illustrating books for children.  I would paraphrase Gaiman by saying we should 'understand and acknowledge that as illustrators for children these artists are doing important work.'  (The books pictured above are Gustafson's "Classic Fairy Tales," Ingpen's "The Wind in the Willows," and Craft's "Beauty and the Beast.")

The balance between turning children on to reading and turning them away from reading isn't easy, but the three blogs in which I have shared Neil Gaiman's suggestions are a good place to start.

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/.)