The Wonder City of Oz

The Wonder City of Oz (1940) is the thirty-fourth book in the Oz series created by L. Frank Baum and his successors, and the first written and illustrated solely by John R. Neill Neill introduced a modern-day reimagining change in tone that continued through his subsequent books, according to David L. Greene and Dick Martin of The Oz Scrapbook; "(His Oz entries) ...are highly imaginative, but the imagination is undisciplined; each book, in fact, has enough ideas to fill several." In Neill's interpretation; Emerald City has skyscrapers and gas stations. Normally inanimate objects act alive: houses talk and fight, shoes sing (they have tongues), and clocks run. The book was followed by Neill's The Scalawagons of Oz (1941).