Wizard of Oz

'The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick' When a tornado crashes through Kansas City, Dorothy and her dog Toto are whisked far away, over the rainbow, to a strange land called Oz. How will they ever get home? And what is at the end of the yellow brick road? Plucky Dorothy and Toto embark on a magical adventure to search for the Wizard of Oz and along the way encounter new friends: the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. Includes exclusive material: In the Backstory you can take the quiz and find out how much you really know about The Wizard of Oz! Vintage Children's Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives. Discover timeless favourites from The Jungle Book and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Like Robin Hood, Alice or Winnie the Pooh, Baum's inventions - the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as Dorothy and her dog Toto - have become the mythological furniture of our children's minds, and of our own and our parents... Funny and inventive -- Marina Warner * Guardian * The tales of Aesop and other fabulists...will never pass entirely away, but a welcome place remains and will easily be found for such stories as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz * New York Times * Baum created a truly extraordinary world, a real world...and filled it with amazing things -- Dinitia Smith [It] has worked its way into the national psyche as a fable of eternal hope in which things are not always as fearsome as they seem * New York Times * Baum dared to offer delight without instruction * Michael Patrick Hearn *.

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L. Frank Baum was born in New York in 1856. The Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was based on a story he used to tell his own children. It became an international bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a stage play (1902) and a film starring Judy Garland (1939). Baum wrote thirteen further Oz books, alongside numerous other novels, short stories, scripts and poems. After his death in 1919, his publishers carried on producing Oz stories and didn't stop until 1963.