Friday from the Archives: “Martin Gardner: North Carolina’s Historian of Oz and Annotator of Alice,” interview by Mark I. West from NCLR 10 (2001)
Making plans to visit Land of Oz for the Autumn in Oz celebration of, this year, the 85th Anniversary of the movie “The Wizard of Oz”? Another longtime fan of Baum’s magical world was Martin Gardner, writer and mathematician, who probably would’ve loved traveling up to Beech Mountain from Hendersonville to take in the re-creation of the Yellow Brick Road and its famed locations.
Mark West wrote about Gardner for our “Science Fiction and Fantasy” feature in 2001. Gardner “was the first person to write a scholarly study of Baum’s life, which appeared in 1957 in a book he co-edited with Russell Nye entitled The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. Also in 1957, he became one of the sixteen founding members of The International Wizard of Oz Club.”
“Gardner wrote several articles for The Baum Bugle, the official magazine of the International Wizard of Oz Club, and he contributed a series of introductions to the facsimile editions of the Oz books re-released by Dover Publications. Gardner then decided to write his own Oz novel. Published in November 1998, Visitors from Oz joined a long list of Oz books written by various authors since Baum’s death. Most of these sequels lack the originality found in the fourteen Oz books written by Baum, but Gardner comes close to matching Baum’s inventiveness.”
Read the entire essay on Gale Cengage or purchase a copy of the 2001 issue and the 1996 issue for another conversation with Martin Gardner.
