Gregory Maguire Wrote a ‘Wicked’ Prequel
Between its Broadway musical adaptation, its film adaptation, and the numerous villain origin stories it inspired, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked seems poised to become an addition to the canon of American literature. The book was already partly a prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Maguire explained why he decided to write a prequel to Wicked.
A few pages of Gregory Maguire’s ‘Wicked’ inspired his new book
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West does not have a proper name. In Wicked, she’s called Elphaba or “Elphie” for short. Maguire recently released another book about the character called Elphie: A Wicked Childhood. It elaborates on the early sections of Wicked that deal with the character’s childhood. It is more or less a prequel, though technically it could also be considered an interquel or a parallel novel.
During a 2024 interview with Paste, the author discussed the book. “Elphie takes as its origin point two or three very short segments, and by that I mean not more than a page, a page and a half each, that I had in the original novel,” he said. “Some things that happened to her between the ages of 2 and 16. I understood why that had to come out. It was partly because the book was too long. But I always felt that, in a way, it left Elphaba being a little bit more of a cipher when she got to college than I had originally intended.”
Gregory Maguire explained his strategy to bringing the Wicked Witch to life on the page
Maguire discussed his approach to the Wicked Witch of the West. “That’s a strategy of storytelling,” he said. “Put a mystery figure in the middle and little by little as you see other people look at her you will, yourself, come to a conclusion about who she might be or who she must be. But I still think that we benefit from knowing some things that happen to somebody in childhood, even if it doesn’t change our conclusion about how it changed them, things happen.”
In a way, Maguire’s original book was an example of this time-tested strategy. The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a minor character. The beloved MGM film The Wizard of Oz gave her more characterization but there was still plenty of room for her to be fleshed out. It wasn’t until Wicked that audiences had a three-dimensional view of one of the most famous villains in the history of children’s literature.
Will the ‘Wicked’ movie make ‘Elphie’ a hit?
So will the new movie Wicked make Elphie a hit? Only time will tell. Maguire wrote a number of books about the Land of Oz after the success of Wicked. While some of them have fans, none of them had the same impact as the original novel. That’s probably because only the first book in his series inspired a Broadway show. While novels used to stand on their own, today books only seem to stand the test of time when they inspire adaptations to other forms of media, such as films, television shows, and musicals.
The Wicked Witch of the West needed a backstory and Maguire filled that need.
