He was also inspired by the 1993 murder of James Bulger, in which both victim and perpetrators were young children.Įveryone 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. 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. He wondered whether calling a person evil might be enough to cause a self-fulfilling prophecy. He noticed that while the problem of evil had been explored from many different perspectives, those perspectives were seldom synthesized together. Maguire began contemplating the nature of evil while living in London in the early 1990s. 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 life purpose. It is presented as a biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, here given the name 'Elphaba.' The book follows Elphaba from her birth as the result of a rape through her radicalization, social ostracism, and finally her death at the hands of Dorothy Gale.

Frank Baum, its sequels, and the 1939 film adaptation.

Wicked is a revisionist exploration of the characters and setting of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. The musical is in the process of being adapted into a two-part feature film, with the first film scheduled to be released in November 2024 and the second film in December 2025. In 2003, it was adapted as the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked. It is the first in The Wicked Years series, and was followed by Son of a Witch (published in September 2005), A Lion Among Men (published in October 2008), and Out of Oz (published in November 2011). Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is an American novel published in 1995, written by Gregory Maguire with illustrations by Douglas Smith.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire