SOURCE: Riley, Michael O. “Resolution of Conflict: 1917-1919.” In Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, pp. 202-29. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Riley discusses the last four Oz books and their significance to Baum's development of his fairyland Oz.

For, after all, dear reader, these stories of Oz are just yours and mine, and we are partners. As long as you care to read them I shall try to write them.

—L. Frank Baum, “To My Readers” in The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

L. Frank Baum's life was an unusually eventful one that took him across the entire breadth of America, but the wandering had not been the result of free choice on his part. Without the reversals he and his family suffered in the early 1880s, he would most probably have been content to remain in Syracuse, New...