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 novel 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), plus a number of short stories since 2012.

Wicked is a cynical, adult-oriented revision of the characters and setting of L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, along with its sequels and 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 depicts the traditionally villainous character in a sympathetic light, using her journey to explore the problem of evil and nature versus nurture debate, as well as themes of terrorism, propaganda, and existential purpose.

In 2003, the novel was loosely 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 released in November 2025. Despite heavy changes from his novel, Maguire gave high praise to the adaptations, dedicating Son of a Witch to the musical and speaking highly of the films.

Background

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 various different perspectives, those perspectives were seldom synthesized together.</blockquote>He was also inspired by the 1993 murder of James Bulger, in which both victim and perpetrators were young children.<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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.

Prior to writing Wicked, Maguire became interested in examining the nature of evil from the perspective of someone considered evil. The novel raises the question of whether evil is inborn or acquired. Elphaba is a social outcast despite being of noble birth, which makes her question how much power she truly has over her own life.

Propaganda and terrorism

Writing for The American Experience, Rebecca Onion called Wicked "an extended meditation on power and politics." Maguire has noted the similarities between the words "wicked" and "Hitler," calling it "no accident" that he chose this title for his book. He recalled reading a newspaper headline in 1991 comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and feeling firsthand the emotional power of propaganda. In the book, one major plank of the Wizard's agenda involves the subjugation of sapient Animals

Tor noted that terrorism, committed both by and against the state, plays a major role in the second half of the book. The Wizard keeps an SS-like secret police, the Gale Force, which uses violence to carry out his totalitarian agenda. Elphaba similarly uses terrorism to combat them, Elphaba discovers her own purpose as a student at Shiz University, where the murder of her favorite professor, Dr. Dillamond, inspires her to join the cause of Animal rights.

As revisionist literature

Wicked is on its face a revisionist parallel novel for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Independent compared it to Wide Sargasso Sea and Wild Wood as part of "a fascinating sub-genre of novels that revisit well-known stories as much in the spirit of criticism as homage." Kirkus Reviews called it "A captivating, funny, and perceptive look at destiny, personal responsibility, and the not-always-clashing beliefs of faith and magic." Library Journal recommended the book to "good readers who like satire, and love exceedingly imaginative and clever fantasy." The Los Angeles Times favorably compared Wicked with other "fantasy novels of ideas" such as Gormenghast and Dune.

The New York Times was a notable outlier, criticizing the novel's strident politics and moral relativism. Reviewer Michiko Kakutani argued that Maguire "shows little respect for Baum's original story." Wicked, she felt, "turns a wonderfully spontaneous world of fantasy into a lugubrious allegorical realm, in which everything and everyone is labeled with a topical name tag."

In 2005, ten years after its publication, Wicked spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel has sold five million copies since its 1995 publication.

==Adaptations==<!-- Please remember that this article is for the original novel. Both the musical and movie have their own articles. Consider whether your edit might be a better fit there. -->

Musical

In 2003, the novel was adapted as the Broadway musical Wicked by composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz and librettist Winnie Holzman. The musical was produced by Universal Pictures and directed by Joe Mantello, with musical staging by Wayne Cilento. The Broadway production was followed by long-running productions in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the United States, as well as London, Germany, and Japan. It was nominated for ten Tony Awards, winning three, and is the 4th longest-running Broadway show in history, with over 8,500 performances. The original Broadway production starred Idina Menzel as Elphaba and Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda.

Unproduced television program

In a 2009 interview, Maguire stated that he had sold the rights to ABC to make an independent non-musical TV adaptation of Wicked. It would not be based on Winnie Holzman's script for the musical play. On January 9, 2011, Entertainment Weekly reported that ABC would be teaming up with Salma Hayek and her production company to create a TV miniseries of Wicked based solely on Maguire's novel. The miniseries never entered production.

Films

In September 2010, Filmshaft disclosed that Universal Pictures was beginning work on a film adaptation of the stage musical. In December 2012, following the success of Les Misérables, Marc Platt, also a producer of the stage version, announced the film was going ahead, later confirming the film was aiming for a 2016 release. Universal announced in 2016 that the film would be released in theaters on December 22, 2021, with Stephen Daldry directing. After production was shut down during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, and was replaced by Jon M. Chu. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were cast as Elphaba and Galinda, respectively, with Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero.

The first film of the two-part adaptation was released on November 22, 2024, and the second film was released on November 21, 2025.

Graphic novel

In March 2025, William Morrow Paperbacks published the first volume of a graphic novel adaptation of Wicked, with illustrations by Scott Hampton.

References

  • GregoryMaguire.com - the author's official website, which includes a discussion forum.
  • Wicked the novel and Wicked the musical details on the official Stephen Schwartz fan site
  • Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West study guide