Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

If there was an aspect in which L. Frank Baum became a victim of his own success it was that his name has become so synonymous with the first Oz book that his voluminous work outside of the Oz cannon has largely been forgotten and, for that matter, so have many of the later books set in the Land of Oz. This proved a chagrin for Baum who by the late 1900s was ready to branch out from Oz and into other series he had developed. But much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who had to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after an outcry from the fans, Baum had to reopen the Oz series in 1913 with The Patchwork Girl of Oz, undoing the ending of its predecessor, 1910’s The Emerald City of Oz, in which the fairyland was sealed off from contact with the outside world (Baum’s way of gently explaining to children why he was unable to write about it again). Baum found a timely way to undo the dilemma, however, when it was obvious his popularity was left behind with Dorothy and her friends. He noted at the start of...

When Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! first caught my attention years ago I imagined a saga of the frontiersmen and the great journey west, with wagons dotting the Great Plains. But then I knew little if anything of Willa Cather. After reading her next novel, Song of the Lark, I arrived at O Pioneers! knowing I was in for a celebration of the often-overlooked heroes of the American frontier, the women tilled the land. But O Pioneers! is more than a tale of the Pioneer Mother, it celebrates the independent woman, her free-spirit, courage and determination and her connection with the earth. In the novel’s hero, Alexandra Bergson (the daughter of Swedish immigrants who takes over the family farm after the death of her father), one can trace the spiritual ancestor of later champions of the land like Rachel Carson and Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores. Her own father, on his deathbed, recognizes her above her three brothers, as the one to save the family farm. The old man was to be proven right. Whe...