In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Wizardess of Oz*
  • Russel B. Nye (bio)

It would have been difficult to think of anyone better fitted to take over the mantle of L. Frank Baum than Ruth Plumly Thompson, whose nineteen chronicles of Ozland and dozens of additions to its population have become as famous in their own right as Baum's originals. Growing up as she did in a family environment of security, closeness, love, and activity, she came to the task of continuing the Oz series with the keen sense of participation in the life of the young and the respect for its attitudes and goals that Baum's successor had to have to be successful. John R. Neill, who illustrated all of the Oz books done under her name, recognized this at once. He wrote Reilly and Lee, after he had finished reading the manuscript of Kabumpo in Oz, that "the whimsical, the humor, the interest, and the zip of the book" marked her as eminently qualified to carry on. Certainly Neill's judgment has been validated by time and a million readers.

Yet Miss Thompson, in continuing the series, did much more than merely follow out the patterns established by Baum. The briskness of pace of the books that followed Kabumpo was hers, the characters she introduced attracted loyal followers in their own right, and the concepts that underlay her Land of Oz developed it into a country not quite the same as that one Dorothy was blown into so many books before. She brought to her task a briskness of mood and a freshness of imagination, an enthusiasm and gusto, that were her own and which consistently marked her books throughout. As one young reader told her, she had "a more exciting way of writing"—a way of making the reader, another said, "feel more at home inside your books." There is, as one surveys the range of Miss Thompson's Oz, a good deal of truth in these observations. Her books were pervaded, in a way that Baum's were not, with a sense of sheer light-heartedness, of fun and good nature, that is peculiarly her own. As she once said, writing the Oz books "is either easy or impossible, and if they are not fun for you to write, they will not be fun to read. " Somewhat dismayed at the gravity with which some Oz Club members have approached her books, she remarked recently: "They take it seriously. I just have fun with it."

This, I think, may well be the key to Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz—that is, the different quality of imagination, as distinct from Baum's, that is operative in her books. Baum, especially in his later books, seems to have considered Oz with a somewhat detached calculation, fitting together his plots and characterizations with rather careful intent. His interest in dramatic writing, in adult fiction, [End Page 119] and in designing an American fairy-tale genre predisposed him to his own particular kind of creative approach. There is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, a strain of moralism in Baum's work, a strain of satire—gentle, implicit, but persistently there—and a strain of thoughtful humor that lends his narratives of Oz a third dimension unusual in American juvenile literature.

Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz, it seems to me, is a truer world of fun and fantasy, and a less complex one. I have not been able to feel in her books the same depth of characterization that the earlier Baum books display, nor the sense of geographic volume present in Dorothy's Oz. Miss Thompson's is a different, individualized inventiveness, no less valid in its final effect, but operating horizontally on a different plane. There is, in the final analysis, a flavor of playfulness in her books, the impression that a quite unserious diversion is being played out between writer and reader in which both win. Her writing, she has explained, is the result of a kind of free-association reverie in which writer and reader are swept away into an inward, non-logical world where anything good and funlike can happen. There is a capricious quality in the Thompson Oz...

pdf

Share