The clearest candidate for America's favorite fairy tale might be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The author L. Frank Baum set the novel, published in 1900, in a fantasy land that shares core American values: self-sufficiency, personal reinvention, the exploration of wider frontiers. The book's young heroine, Dorothy, is whisked away to Oz, where she befriends magical creatures, thwarts a witch, and leans on her newfound strength and friends in order to return home. For Dorothy, it is a land of empowerment and possibility; for Baum'who perpetuated manifest destiny's warped ideals in his other writings'and his many readers, it was an otherworldly representation of the American expanse, a place they perhaps wanted to see for themselves. Baum's novel and its sequels were major literary phenomena in their day. But Oz persists primarily through the books' many adaptations, which established the series' enduring iconography. Baum's world is best remembered as it has appeared on-screen,...
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