By Janet Maslin New York Times:

It took a prairie tornado to transport little gingham-clad Dorothy Gale from Kansas to the Land of Oz. But how did L. Frank Baum, Dorothy’s creator, get there?

That question has answers that can be related to the kinds of analysis that became extremely timely in 1900, the year Baum introduced Dorothy, the Wizard, the Tin Woodman and friends in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” As Rebecca Loncraine points out in “The Real Wizard of Oz,” 1900 brought the arrival of not one but two timeless works exploring the vast power of the covert imagination. The other was Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams.”

Loncraine means to apply a Freudian logic to the forces that shaped Baum’s endlessly inventive storytelling. In this she is hardly alone.

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I have to be honest, this doesn’t interest me in the least. I have found that most bios are so dry that I can’t finish them. Are you interested in reading this biography?