Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz without any thought of a sequel. After reading the novel, thousands of children wrote letters to him, requesting that he craft another story about Oz. In 1904, amid financial difficulties,[68] Baum wrote and published the first sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz,[68] declaring that he grudgingly wrote the sequel to address the popular demand.[69] He dedicated the book to stage actors Fred Stone and David C. Montgomery who played the characters of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman on stage.[68] Baum wrote large roles for the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman that he deleted from the stage version, The Woggle-Bug, after Montgomery and Stone had balked at leaving a successful show to do a sequel.
Baum later wrote sequels in 1907, 1908, and 1909. In his 1910 The Emerald City of Oz, he wrote that he could not continue writing sequels because Ozland had lost contact with the rest of the world. The children refused to accept this story, so Baum, in 1913 and every year thereafter until his death in May 1919, wrote an Oz book, ultimately writing 13 sequels and half a dozen Oz short stories.
Baum explained the purpose of his novels in a note he penned to his sister, Mary Louise Brewster, in a copy of Mother Goose in Prose (1897), his first book. He wrote, "To please a child is a sweet and a lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward."[70] After Baum's death in 1919, Baum's publishers delegated the creation of more sequels to Ruth Plumly Thompson who wrote 21.[45] An original Oz book was published every Christmas between 1913 and 1942.[71] By 1956, five million copies of the Oz books had been published in the English language, while hundreds of thousands had been published in eight foreign languages.[10]
