SOURCE: Franson, J. Karl. “From Vanity Fair to Emerald City: Baum's Debt to Bunyan.” Children's Literature 23 (1995): 91-114.

In the following essay, Franson discusses the possible influence of John Bunyan's allegory Pilgrim's Progress on Baum's writing of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

My interest in a possible “confluence of reminiscences” affecting the creation of L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) began (like the curiosity of Lowes regarding Coleridge's imaginative vision) with “a strange footprint caught sight of accidentally just off the beaten track” that became “an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials” (Lowes 180, 3). It was the beaten track itself, the Road of Yellow Brick, that led me to a major source of Baum's classic tale and ultimately a new perspective from which to read it.¹

On the original map of Oz, Baum envisioned the road leading to the Emerald...