I was struck by the unevenness of style not only from book to book but, sometimes, from page to page. I have reread the Oz books in the order in which they were written. Frank Baum says that he would like to create modern fairy tales by departing from Grimm and Andersen and “all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised” by such authors “to point a fearsome moral.” Baum then makes the disingenuous point that “Modern education includes morality therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wondertales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.” Yet there is a certain amount of explicit as well as implicit moralizing in the Oz books there are also “disagreeable incidents,” and people do, somehow, die even though death and illness are not supposed to exist in Oz.
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