The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
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Section 0 of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Introduction. Folklore, legends, myths, and fairy tales have followed children through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous, and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Anderson have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations. Yet the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as historical in the children's library. For the time has come for a series of newer wonder tales, in which the stereotype genie, dwarf, and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality. Therefore, the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all the disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out. L. Frank Baum. Chicago. April, 1900. End of section 0. Section 1. Of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. This SlipperVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Val Roth. Chapter 1. The Cyclone. Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, the floor and a roof, which made one room, and this room contained a rusty-looking cook-stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar, except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into a small dark hole. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the ploughed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the