The Greeks had their Olympus and their myths; we have our Hollywood and its films. There was a time when a myth was a traditional story known to a given culture, and whose origins were lost in time. Such tales were preserved through centuries by word of mouth, and finally crafted into the great poetic epics of the ancient world. Eventually, some were taken up by the playwrights of classical Athens, and then by writers closer to our own age. Our new myths are more varied in kind and tend, like the Aeneid, to be custom-made; but they strike more quickly into the resonant depths of popular emotion.
We have myths that are, so to speak, more in the glorious Greek tradition, though they are familiar to millions more people than the ancient Greek stories ever were at any one time. These fantasies have been absorbed into the Jungian shadows of our public imagination, where they enhance life instead of destroying it; they confirm the child's innate sense that life is good and worth living; and they restore the freshness of that knowledge in the psyche of some lucky adults. No one knows exactly how or why this important miracle takes place, but when it does reveal itself, it is easy to recognize.
Awesome Kingdom
One such revelation began in 1900, when the American children's writer Lyman Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This book tells the story of how a little farm girl, Dorothy, and her dog Toto are accidentally caught up and swept into the eye of a Kansas cyclone. It whirls them away from the gray real world to Munchkin-land, part of an awesome and lovely kingdom called Oz, inhabited by strange little people, by good and bad witches, with a beautiful capital called the Emerald City. The Munchkins send Dorothy along a yellow brick road to see the ruler of Oz--a wonderful Wizard whose magic may get her back to Kansas. On the way, she is joined by a live Scarecrow who longs for a brain, a Tin Woodman who aches for a heart, and a lovable but cowardly Lion who wants more than anything to be brave. Before granting their wishes, the Wizard sends them with Dorothy on a dangerous journey to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. They accomplish their mission and return to the Emerald City, where they discover that the Wizard, like Dorothy, is an interloper from the real world; his marvels are not magic but trickery. But there is a good witch who does make magic, and with her help Dorothy is taken back to Kansas and her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. It seems the whole adventure may have been a dream, although Dorothy is sure it was not.
Unlike many children's books of the period, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum purportedly took the name from an O-Z card on a file drawer) was not written as a moral homily but, in the words of the author, "solely to pleasure the children" of his day. Its unique combination of horse sense and fey storytelling was so successful that the book, with its W.W. Denslow illustrations, became almost an integral part of the literate American childhood. Baum's other works, like Tot and Dot and Father Goose, were forgotten. He continued with a series of Oz was travestied into an adult musical show--vulgarized and altered beyond all recognition--but still ran on Broadway for 293 performances in 1903. There were also two silent film versions, one seen by Baum before he died in 1919, and another in the mid-1920s, starring a young, slim Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman.
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