New York native Frank Baum‘s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been inspiring artists – filmmakers, political cartoonists, poets, sculptors, songwriters – for more than 100 years.
OZmosis: The Enduring Popularity & Artistic Influence of The Wizard of Oz (2025) by Noel Holston collects and annotates works from tin-can sculpture to movie musicals. It’s an illuminating and amusing compendium.
OZmosis explores the influence of The Wizard of Oz, both the MGM movie and the L. Frank Baum books, on all sorts of artists. Baum was born in Chittenango, in Madison County, NY. The town is home to the best of the nation’s several Oz museums, the All Things Oz.
While OZmosis is primarily focused on filmmakers, songwriters, cartoonists and other artists who’ve been inspired by Baum’s themes and characters, it also includes biographical background and explorations of his own influences.
Author Noel Holston is a Pulitzer-nominated journalist, a songwriter, storyteller and photographer from Laurel, Mississippi, who published his 2019 memoir Life After Deaf (Skyhorse Books), after spending almost a decade battling back from a catastrophic overnight hearing loss. Three cochlear implant operations and extensive therapy ultimately restored his conversational hearing, though not his pitch.
That didn’t stop him from completing his first CD, Better Late, in 2021 with help from his wife, singer Marty Winkler, and friends from their adopted hometown, music-rich Athens, Georgia. Holston has also written As I Die Laughing, a memoir of his “free range” Deep South childhood.
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