Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Discontented Gopher | 1905 | L. Frank Baum | Buy |
Prairie Tales consists of a single entry: L. Frank Baum’s The Discontented Gopher, published in 1905. The story is a short animal fable set on the American prairie, featuring a gopher who is dissatisfied with his simple life underground. It belongs to the tradition of talking-animal moral tales that Baum wrote alongside his more famous Oz novels.
Baum spent several years living in South Dakota in the early 1890s, and the prairie landscape left a lasting mark on his writing. The flat, open grasslands of the Midwest appear throughout his work, most famously in the Kansas scenes of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Discontented Gopher draws on that same setting but tells a smaller, quieter story about being content with who you are.