Both the American author, L. Frank Baum, and his Brazilian counterpart, Jose Monteiro Lobato, created children's books that featured alternative worlds, peopled by characters who fascinated many generations of young readers. The authors were both born in the second half of the nineteenth century into families of privilege, and both enjoyed idyllic childhoods in rural settings, Baum in upstate New York and Lobato in the Brazilian interior. Another parallel is that both came late to writing for children after pursuing various other careers with indifferent success. Baum's series of 62 Oz books published over 19 years were written in a plain, down-to-earth prose style, and his youthful protagonists behaved like ordinary children. Lobato's world, also sustained through many books and over many years, was the "Farm of the Yellow Woodpecker" ("Sitio do Picapau Amarelo"), inhabited by an elderly grandmother, an equally elderly black cook, the young girl Narizinho, and her rag doll Emilia. Oz has been described as a self-contained enclave surrounded on all sides not by the sea but by impassable deserts. Lobato's "sitio" better fits the description of a Utopia--the characters rarely leave the farm and always return there in the end. "The Wizard of Oz" found a worldwide popular audience thanks to the movies and, later, television, while the "Farm of the Yellow Woodpecker" became known throughout Latin America because of a long-running (14 years) serial on Brazilian TV. (JC)