Among the ruins of all the promises that had been made—by Horace Greeley, by Abraham Lincoln, by the Homestead Act, by the railroads, by the rain-follows-the-plow fantasists—people were struggling to explain what happened. A new Plains literature began to emerge. One of its first manifestations, unspeakably strange in its combination of a stripped-down style, outlandish daydream, and improbable escapism, was L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.
