Concord man pens 'Wicked' smash

Gregory Maguire was sitting in a plane flying over the Rockies when he read the review of his novel ''Wicked."

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''That New York Times review was the worst day of my professional life," said Maguire. The reviewer called him a ''literary recycler" who showed ''little respect" for ''one of America's most beloved classics of children's literature."

Since then, the book has sold over 1 million copies, and has been made into a television miniseries and a now-touring Broadway musical that was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, winning three.

A week after the New York Times review, the good reviews resumed.

The Los Angeles Times called ''Wicked" ''a staggering feat of wordcraft," ''the best fantasy novel of ideas," and said Maguire had created ''one of the great heroines in fantasy literature: a fiery, passionate, unforgettable and ultimately tragic figure." Maguire, who now lives in West Concord, started getting movie offers the next morning.

''Wicked" is about Elphaba, the misunderstood Wicked Witch of the West who was born with emerald-green skin. She was an oddity in superstitious Oz, ''where people call you wicked if you tell the truth," according to the book's flap copy. Her pals in the story are Boq, a Munchkin who is smitten with Elphaba's roommate Glinda; Nessarose, Elphaba's sister, who was born without arms; and Fiyero, the tribal prince.

John Updike called ''Wicked" an ''amazing novel" in an essay on evil in The New Yorker.

Evil was what Maguire set out to write about when he started ''Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West." While he was living in London in the early 1990s, after earning his doctorate in English and American literature from Tufts University, several events, from a local murder to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, moved him to write about how a person becomes evil.

Maguire also has written over 15 children's books and three subsequent books for adults, including revisions of two fairy tales: ''Cinderella" (''Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister") and ''Snow White" (''Mirror, Mirror"). He's finishing his fifth adult novel, ''Son of A Witch," which debuts this fall, and is entertaining the idea of writing a screenplay or a theater script.

Though he only moved to West Concord in 1994, Maguire was interested in the town as a child. ''I came to know Concord at the age of 10 by reading Jane Langton's children's novels and by seeing drawings of Concord," said Maguire. ''Concord was my first literary mecca, in a sense, before Shakespeare, before London, before Dickens."

''The Wizard of Oz" was the only television movie he was allowed to watch as a child, so for entertainment, Maguire and his siblings used their imaginations. ''We were just like Louisa May Alcott," he said, ''we put on family plays every Sunday; it was called the Sunday Night Entertainment Committee."

Born and raised in ''intensely Catholic" Albany, N.Y., Maguire grew up in a lower middle class, Irish Catholic family with six other children. He believes his mother's death made his father and stepmother fearful of losing another life, and consequently very strict. He also wrote ''hundreds of stories" as a child until he had an idea in high school that, at 24, became his first book, ''The Lightning Time." Maguire explored the world through reading and writing fantasy because it ''afforded the farthest reaches that I could project myself while still being a good Catholic and going to Mass every day of the week."

Extremely grateful to the people who have nurtured him, Maguire has found ways of paying homage. ''Two Sisters" is about twins in a Catholic orphanage. It's the children's novel that he is most proud of and that relies most on his own experience, having spent some time in an orphanage after his mother died.

He is devoted to his family -- three adopted children, ages 7 and younger, and his husband, Andy Newman, who is a painter. Adoption ''satisfied the moral equation in my own mind," he said, and was a way of fondly thanking his stepmother. Because of the demands of family life, Maguire is slowly winding down the volunteer work he has done since college, including cofounding Children's Literature New England. Each day he handles the business of being an author first, and in the afternoon he settles down to write in his ''little jewel box of a nest."

Aside from the tragedy of losing his mother, Maguire feels he has had extraordinary good fortune. ''With the success of the play, more and more teenage girls are reading the novel," he said. And that has had an unexpected benefit that Maguire saw for himself, when he and cast member Idina Menzel, who played Elphaba, were signing the CD. Among the autograph seekers were many black, mixed race, and Asian women between the ages of 14 and 24. ''Idina Menzel had to keep leaping up and leaning over [the table] to embrace weeping young women who were saying to her in their various accents and various inflections, 'I have seen myself in what you do; yours is my story.' "

''There is the hope that in being an artist you can add to what comforts others," said Maguire. ''The story of this brave, slightly feckless green-skinned girl has just reached more people, it has consoled them and inspired them, too."

Authors Among Us is an occasional series featuring distinguished writers who live in the northwest suburbs.