![]() Throughout the fourteen-volume series there are sharply drawn contrasts between the gray, careworn adult world and the vibrant vision of a child’s imagination, or between the stolidity of mid-America and the exuberance of Oz. ![]() Denslow drew its severe, monotonous landscape in gray, in contrast to his color pictures of Oz, 1 and the 1939 MGM film mimicked his technique by presenting Kansas in black-and-white and Oz in color. Dorothy Gale’s Kansas, in the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is the model: W.W. Frank Baum’s Oz stories follow a pattern in which a child hero sets out, often accidentally, for an adventure in fairyland from a starting place that is dull or blighted. Baum’s impressions of La Jolla as a magical place are understandable in light of his previous experience and both echo and enhance a popular stereotype of Southern California as an earthly paradise. Trot’s home is in La Jolla, which Baum visited in 1904-5, when he began wintering at Coronado. This is in contrast to the rest of the Oz series, in which the child protagonist escapes to an exciting and beautiful fairyland from a prosaic or austere home setting, exemplified by Dorothy Gale’s Kansas. In Baum’s books The Sea Fairies, Sky Island, and The Scarecrow of Oz, the young heroine Trot starts her adventures from a home place that has physical beauty, variety, and mystery. ![]() ![]() Frank Baum, creator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Oz series. By far the most popular children’s writer of the early twentieth century was L. ![]()
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