The Wizard of Oz

'The Wizard of Oz "was my very first literary influence," writes Salman Rushdie in his account of the great MGM children's classic. At the age of ten he had written a story, "Over the Rainbow," about a colorful fantasy world. But for Rushdie "The Wizard of Oz" is more than a children's film, and more than a fantasy. It's a story whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, where the weakness of grown-ups forces children to take control of their own destinies. Rushdie rejects the conventional view that its fantasy of escape from reality ends with a comforting return to home, sweet home. On the contrary, it is a film that speaks to the exile. "The Wizard of Oz "shows that imagination can become reality, that there is no such place like home, or rather that the only home is the one we make for ourselves. Rushdie's brilliant insights into a film more often seen than written about are rounded off with a typically scintillating new short story, "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," about the day when Dorothy's red shoes are knocked down to $15,000 at a sale of MGM props. This new edition of Rushdie's study is published in the Film Classics 20th anniversary series of special editions, with a new foreword by the author, and a stunning new jacket design by Chloe Giordano.

SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of eleven previous novels – Luka and the Fire
of Life, Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the
Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and
The Enchantress of Florence – and one collection of short stories, East, West.
He has also published three works of nonfiction – The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary
Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, and Step Across This Line – and coedited
two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is
the former president of American PEN.

Foreword 

I A Short Text About Magic

II At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers 

Credits

Bibliography