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. 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). In 2003, it was adapted as the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked. The musical is in the process of being adapted into a feature film. Wicked is a revisionist exploration of the characters and setting of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, its sequels, and the 1939 film adaptation. 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. 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. 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 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