Like Robin Hood, Alice or Winnie the Pooh, Baum's inventions - the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as Dorothy and her dog Toto - have become the mythological furniture of our children's minds, and of our own and our parents... Funny and inventive
- Marina Warner, Guardian
The tales of Aesop and other fabulists...will never pass entirely away, but a welcome place remains and will easily be found for such stories as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
New York Times
Baum created a truly extraordinary world, a real world…and filled it with amazing things
- Dinitia Smith,
[It] has worked its way into the national psyche as a fable of eternal hope in which things are not always as fearsome as they seem
New York Times
Baum dared to offer delight without instruction
Michael Patrick Hearn