Oz & San Diego

Is Oz really California? (from the Los Angeles Times Magazine)

L. Frank Baum (1911). By George Steckel, Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library. Public Domain.

“Was it real or was it a dream?” The question has been raised again and again about the land of Oz. In the 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is hit on the head during the cyclone and dreams up the magical land. Nothing like that happens in L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Judy Garland may have wished to go somewhere over the rainbow, but in the book the cyclone takes Dorothy to Oz while she is wide awake — and quite against her wishes. In the book, Oz is a real place, not a land created by Dorothy’s fertile imagination.

W.W. Denslow’s map of Oz. Denslow mistakenly reversed the locations of the Munchkin and Winkie countries.

Readers used to write Baum and ask just where Oz was. Some thought it somewhere near Chicago; after all, Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while living there. And, when one considers the map of Oz, it is not an altogether unreasonable proposition: To the west is the land of the Winkies, a wild, untilled region full of marauding prairie wolves, somewhat like South Dakota; to the east is the land of the Munchkins, a place that resembles the Pennsylvania Dutch country. To the south is the land of the Quadlings, inhabited in part by hillbilly-like Hammerheads. To the north, in later…