6/9/2023 0 Comments Jayhawker by Patricia Beatty![]() ![]() Other early children’s literature focuses on equally iconic images of Kansas: the 1951) and My Life with Corpses, by Wylene Dunbar (b. Baum’s work has inspired several Kansas and/or Oz-based books for adult readers: Wicked, by Gregory Maguire (b. Although his opening description of Kansas is probably the bleakest of any writer on the state, Baum also gave Kansas the distinction of being the home of Dorothy’s line: “There is no place like home.” And, of course, the less flattering, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Baum included the Kansas setting in three other Oz books (see “Oz and Kansas Culture,” by Thomas Fox Averill, Kansas History, Vol. Frank Baum (1856-1919), who set foot in Kansas only once, as an actor with a traveling theater company, set The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) in the state, most likely so as not to offend relatives who still lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota Territory, which is probably the region he was describing as gray, flat, dull and humorless. Uncharacteristically, the government forced the Ingalls to move, but the experience, remembered many years later, became Little House on the Prairie (1935). ![]() ![]() Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), lived on Cherokee land about 14 miles from Independence, Kansas, in 1869-1870. Kansas children and young adult literature is dominated in the public mind by the two iconic books set in the state. ![]() For specific kinds of Kansas literature, see: ![]()
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