Finding Dorothy: A Novel

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Letts takes readers on an unflinching journey between hardship and hope, with a catch-your-breath ending. Now, with the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her—the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy. To get her to be able to lead and to get an audience to be able to trust her was the hardest thing to do.

More than just a behind-the-scenes pee at the making of The Wizard of Oz, Finding Dorothy is a heartfelt look at the origins of a beloved story told, through the eyes of the woman closest to its creator. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. On the night of Frank's death on May 16, 1919, Maud imparted in a letter to her relatives, Helen Leslie and Leslie Gage: He told me many times I was the only one he had ever loved. Of course, Andrew would do passes, and he and I would brainstorm a lot together and then we would bring it to the group of story artists. She twisted the emerald she wore on her fourth finger and smoothed the folds of her simple floral dress, aware how out of place she must appear to this elegant young man.

Seventy-­seven years old and Maud sometimes still felt as if her mother were perched just behind the wings, whispering stage instructions.

Maud was ahead of her time – she went to university as her family wanted her to, but then met and married Baum, a man of the theatre. The girl raised a stylishly penciled eyebrow and gave Maud the once-­over, from her gray curls down to her sturdy brown pumps.He hated to die, did not want to leave me, said he was never happy without me, but it was better he should go first, if it had to be, for I doubt if he could have got along without me. Maud Baum had been waiting on foot outside the massive front gates of Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer for almost an hour, just another face among the throngs of visitors hoping for a chance to get inside. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements.