Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Political interpretations of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" include treatments of the modern fairy tale (written by L. Frank Baum and first published in 1900) as an allegory or metaphor for the political, economic, and social events of America in the 1890s. Scholars have examined four quite different versions of Oz: the novel of 1900, the Broadway play of 1901, the Hollywood film of 1939, and the numerous follow-up Oz novels written after 1900 by Baum and others. The political interpretations focus on the first three, and emphasize the close relationship between
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz University Press of Kansas's "Kansas Centennial Edition", illustrated by Michael McCurdy with black-and-white illustrations, and Robert Sabuda's pop-up book. Baum wrote "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" without any thought of a sequel. After reading the novel, thousands of children wrote letters to him, requesting that he craft another story about Oz. In 1904, he wrote and published the first sequel, "The Marvelous Land of Oz", explaining that he grudgingly wrote the sequel to address the popular demand. Baum also wrote sequels in 1907, 1908, and 1909. In his 1911 "The Emerald City of Oz", he wrote that he could not