Wicked (Maguire novel)

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is a 1995 dark fantasy novel by American writer Gregory Maguire with illustrations by Douglas Smith. It is the first in The Wicked Years series, and was followed by Son of a Witch (September 2005), A Lion Among Men (October 2008), and Out of Oz (November 2011).

Wicked is a cynical, adult-themed revisionist exploration of the characters and setting of L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, its sequels, and its 1939 film adaptation. The novel is presented as a biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, here given the name Elphaba Thropp. The book follows Elphaba from her birth through her social ostracism, school years, radicalization, and final days. Maguire shows the traditionally villainous character in a sympathetic light, using her journey to explore the problem of evil and the nature versus nurture debate, as well as themes of terrorism, propaganda, and existential purpose.

In 2003, the novel was adapted as the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked, in-turn adapted into a two-part feature film, with the first film released in November 2024 and the second film expected in November 2025.

Maguire began contemplating the nature of evil while living in London in the early 1990s. He noticed that while the problem of evil had been explored from many different perspectives, those perspectives were seldom synthesized together. He wondered whether calling a person evil might be enough to cause a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize? How much of that would you say, all right, go ahead, I'll be everything that you call me because I have no capacity to change your minds anyway so why bother. By whose standards should I live?

He was also inspired by the 1993 murder of James Bulger, in which both victim and perpetrators were young children.

Everyone was asking: how could those boys be so villainous? Were they born evil or were there circumstances that pushed them towards behaving like that? It propelled me back to the question of evil that bedevils anybody raised Catholic.

Up to that point strictly a children's author, Maguire had difficulty finding an effective way to write about evil, since in his mind, there were no truly evil characters in children's literature. In what he later described as "the one great revelation of my life," Maguire realized that there were in fact villains in children's books; however, they were usually written as one-dimensional stock characters in order to provoke a quick emotional reaction from young readers. Wondering whom to write about, he envisioned the Wicked Witch of the West, as played by Margaret Hamilton in the MGM film, delivering her iconic line, "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!" Maguire had a lifelong fascination with The Wizard of Oz, both Baum's original novel and the film, which he watched every year during its annual broadcast. He decided to tell the Wicked Witch's life story using the same large scale and broad moral messages found in the novels of Charles Dickens.