Early Life and Early Works

(Ahmed) Salman Rushdie justifies Wordsworth’s view that ‘the Child is father of the Man’.1 Rushdie wrote: ‘The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the book, which I didn’t read as a child) was my very first literary influence. 2 … . When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me.’ 3 The other important literary influence in his childhood was The Arabian Nights which was the basis for the stories his father narrated to his children and which surfaces in the flying carpets and metamorphoses of The Satanic Verses (1988) and predictably in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).