The Shaggy Man of Oz
Cover of The Shaggy Man of Oz.
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| Author | Jack Snow |
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| Illustrator | Frank Kramer |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Oz Books |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Publisher | Reilly & Lee |
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Publication date
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1949 |
| Media type | print (hardcover) |
| Preceded by | The Magical Mimics in Oz |
| Followed by | The Hidden Valley of Oz |
The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949) is the thirty-eighth in the series of Oz books created by L. Frank Baum and his successors, and the second and last by Jack Snow. It was illustrated by Frank G. Kramer. The book entered the public domain in the United States when its copyright was not renewed as required.
In The Shaggy Man of Oz as in his previous book, The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946), Snow returned to the Oz books of Baum for his inspiration and his conceptual framework. He avoided all use of characters and plot elements introduced in the Oz books of Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill, his predecessors in the post of "Royal Historian of Oz."
For his first Oz book, Snow had relied heavily upon Baum's The Emerald City of Oz. (Far from concealing it, Snow made the relationship between the two books clear in his text.) For his second venture, Snow depended upon Baum's 1906 novel John Dough and the Cherub. In both books, the protagonists escape an exotic but risky place (in Baum, the Island of Phreex; in Snow, Conjo's island) in a borrowed flying machine; they travel to other places from which, in turn, they again need to escape. Baum has a Palace of Romance, and Snow, a Valley of Romance. In Baum's Hiland, the people are tall and thin and live in tall thin houses — just as in Snow's Hightown. And in both novels, the heroes meet the King of the Fairy Beavers, who helps them to their final destination.
Though Snow relied on Baum's forty-year-old book for inspiration, he also faced a need to update the Oz enterprise. His first Oz book, launched in the post-World-War-II world, had not been a commercial success; "Oz books appeared oddly old fashioned and less compelling in an era of rocket engines and atomic bombs." The second book stands in marked contrast to the first in terms of its trappings of modernity. The child protagonists are a contemporary American boy and girl; their father, Professor Jones, teaches physics at a university. The professor owns an early-model television set, and moreover has modified it with a large projection screen of his own design. Conjo the magician has an aircraft — which flies not merely by "magic" but by anti-gravity plates. The episode in Hightown provides further consideration of gravity.
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