| When “The Wizard of Oz” premièred, in the summer of 1939, The New Yorker’s film critic was unimpressed. The movie “displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity,” Russell Maloney wrote; it was, in short, a “stinkeroo.” But audiences disagreed, and, in the intervening decades, the movie has largely eclipsed its source material, a children’s book written by a former travelling china salesman named L. Frank Baum. In 2000, when the book turned a hundred, John Updike revisited the story and its author, whose path to success was almost as winding as the yellow brick road. Baum’s literary inventions have extended deep into this century, albeit with new plots and characters. Friday marks the arrival in theatres of “Wicked,” a musical prequel based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name, which is mentioned briefly in Updike’s article as an example of contemporary output by “Oz-besotted children now aged into postmodern creators.” Baum might not have minded such acts of reinterpretation: during his lifetime, he churned out numerous sequels, along with a silent film and an operetta based on his work. Writers including Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie later saw metaphors for their own experiences in the original story; another enthusiast ranked it alongside “Moby-Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as one of the “great classic quests in American literature.” Updike isn’t prepared to go that far, but he finds examples of Baum injecting more imagination into the world around him (the Midwest city that inspired the Emerald City), and of others who improved upon his vision (the initial color of Dorothy’s ruby slippers). The story’s impact on pop culture remains undeniable—but perhaps not, Updike argues, for the reasons Baum would have anticipated. “It is hard to read Baum’s later Oz books,” he observes, without seeing “a writer who only dimly understands his own masterpiece.” | 
