The Magic of Oz in New York

Photo by Mo Riza (under a Creative Commons license).

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and 13 full-length sequels, never lived in New York City, but he was born only 250 miles north of it, in the upstate town of Chittenango. W. W. Denslow, the illustrator of Wizard, lived in New York City off and on throughout his peripatetic life, and so did John R. Neill, who illustrated 35 of the first 36 Oz books. Jack Snow, who wrote two Oz novels in the latter half of the 1940s, called Manhattan home for the last 13 years of his abbreviated life. Snow's illustrator, Frank Kramer, was a lifelong New Yorker, while Snow's successor as Royal Historian, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, spent her entire adult life in neighboring New Jersey.

These connections between Oz and New York are just the tip of the iceberg. The runaway success of The Wizard of Oz on Broadway in 1903 established a place for Dorothy Gale and her friends in American popular culture that helped sustain the Oz phenomenon until the 1939 film adaptation ensured its permanence. In 1908, Baum brought his traveling show Fairylogue and Radio-Plays to New York. And the connections go on and on.

This blog will chronicle the many ways, both obvious and subtle, in which New York City doubles as the Emerald Apple.

(Thanks to Marcus Mebes for designing the wonderful header.)