Gregory Maguire

About Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire was born on June 9, 1954, in Albany, New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts from SUNY Albany, a Master of Arts from Simmons College, and a PhD in English and American Literature from Tufts University. From 1979 to 1986, he was a professor and co-director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature. In 1987, he co-founded Children's Literature New England, Inc., a nonprofit organization that promotes children's books and reading. His first novel, The Lightning Time, was published in 1978, when he was 24.

Maguire's adult fiction debut, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), reimagines L. Frank Baum's world of Oz from the perspective of Elphaba, the green-skinned witch typically cast as the villain of The Wizard of Oz. The novel explores themes of political persecution, identity, and moral complexity. It sold steadily for years before Stephen Schwartz's Broadway musical adaptation opened in 2003, after which it became a runaway bestseller, spending 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2005 and selling more than 500,000 copies by the time the musical opened. The stage version went on to become the sixth-longest-running show in Broadway history.

The Wicked Years and Later Work

Maguire continued Elphaba's world with Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008), and Out of Oz (2011), completing a four-novel series collectively known as The Wicked Years. His other adult novels include Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), a reimagining of Cinderella set in seventeenth-century Holland, and Mirror Mirror (2003), which retells Snow White in Renaissance Italy. After Alice (2015) revisits Wonderland from the perspective of a girl left behind when Alice slips down the rabbit hole.

In 2024 and 2025, Wicked was adapted into a two-part film franchise. Maguire lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with his husband Andy Newman—whom he married in 2004, among the first same-sex marriages in Massachusetts after the state legalized it—and their three adopted children.