It has now been 26 years since novelist Gregory Maguire first suggested that some are born evil, some achieve evilness, and some, like the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West, have had their evil identities unfairly thrust upon them like a bucket of burning mop water.

Maguire, author of 40 fiction books that often imagine the backstories of classic tales like “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” took a moment in Denver last week to consider the sad, ongoing resonance of his 1995 breakthrough “Wicked,” which inspired the fifth-longest-running musical in Broadway history.

“I actually had intended and hoped that the book’s engagement with the question of evil would become obvious and we would have grown beyond it by now,” Maguire said Wednesday as the featured guest of the venerable Pen & Podium series at the University of Denver.

“And guess what? We have not. And so therefore this is the kind of story that for good, or for ill, continues to have meaning for readers.”

While the musical his book spawned is pure glamour and spectacle in the great tradition of Broadway, Maguire’s expansive novel is a far more complex political allegory that alludes to everything from Hitler’s Germany to Richard Nixon to the first Bush administration.

In fact, the words “Wicked” and “Hitler” are quite similar, Maguire pointed out to me in an earlier interview. Both have two syllables and six letters, two of them in common. So if one were to infer a connection between the title of his book and the world’s most reviled villain of the past century, “that was no accident,” said Maguire.

Long before Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman reimagined Maguire’s novel for the stage, reviewers were hailing the book for its deeper commentaries on unchecked superpowers — of the human kind. Maguire was living in England when the first Gulf War erupted in 1991 and he came across a headline that screamed: “Saddam Hussein: The Next Hitler?”

“I was surprised to find my pulse quickening for military action, even though I had been a card-carrying protester of the Vietnam War,” he told me. “Something about how the story was being framed in the British press made me stop and think that maybe there is such a thing as a just war. After all, Thomas Aquinas said there was. And if there ever was an argument for going to war, even for pacifists and Quakers, it certainly could be made for World War II.

“But I came to understand that just this word ‘Hitler’ is not in itself a moral argument for military action. It’s just a word. It’s an incendiary word, and it’s a word you can’t even talk about, in a sense, because it’s so powerful and so real. But you can’t know that Saddam Hussein is the next Hitler. I thought, ‘How can I be so persuaded to justify military action by this one little word?’ So I became very interested in our human response to jingoism.”

In Maguire’s book, Oz is a place gone very wrong, and if there is a Hitler figure, it is the “wonderful” wizard himself. The yellow-brick road was built by munchkin slave labor, the flying monkeys are the result of animal experimentation, and Oz is populated by a class-based society of oppressed animals. Scholars have equated these animals with Hitler’s Jewish victims, with Maguire’s blessing.

The novel has sold more than 5 million copies, 80 percent of them since the musical bowed in 2003. The story is now largely seen through that lens as a feel-good friendship between two very different empowered women. But at its root remains the cautionary tale planted by Maguire about what happens when we as a society decide to label anyone who differs from the norm as evil. Like Elphaba, whose only crime (at first) was being of a different color. (Side note: Maguire’s first inspiration for the green one, we learned Wednesday, was … drum roll … the Canadian country pop singer k.d. lang!)

This is a tale as old as time, or at least, say, Salem. One surefire way to bring Americans together has always been to go out and find us a good enemy. And if we don’t have one, we’ll make one. The difference between now and say, 9/11, is that the enemy we make today is our neighbor. Or our Facebook friend of a different political persuasion. Today, the enemy is us.

Maguire, as natural a storyteller on stage as he is on paper, held the audience rapt Wednesday recounting his own melancholy origin story for moderator Jeff Neuman. Maguire’s mother died while having him in childbirth, leaving him to be raised by a strict, grief-stricken and ill-equipped newspaperman. “It was a household of some trauma and some terror,” said Maguire, who was sent to an orphanage but eventually was reclaimed by his father when he remarried. But his parents, terrified of what dangers lurked beyond their front door, rarely allowed the children past the porch.

“They would not let us ride bicycles until we were 16,” Maguire said, “and we were only allowed to watch TV for one half hour a week, determined by majority vote.” (Usually “Gilligan’s Island.”)

Maguire turned to his imagination for escape, writing and illustrating hundreds of perilous adventure stories with fun titles such as “The Hotel Bomb” and “Phillip In Trouble.” “My survival strategy was ‘write or die,’ ” Maguire said. “I needed to be myself, and the best way I knew to be myself was to make up stories about people who could survive all kinds of things.” By the time he graduated from high school, Maguire had long surpassed Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule to achieve mastery of a complex skill.

It was the day Maguire turned 39 — one year older than his mother when she died in childbirth — that he resolved to write the book that would change his destiny. The book that would dare to ask whether the most iconic face of evil in entire the American literature canon was born evil — or simply finally accepted the title already long given by those around her.

“People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us,” Maguire writes in “Wicked.” “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

Maguire’s newest book is called “The Brides of Maracoor,” a three-part series featuring Elphaba’s granddaughter, the green-skinned Rain. But even 26 years later, there’s no question which book remains his personal favorite. It’s “Wicked,” which gave Maguire enough financial security to adopt his three children from overseas.

“Without the success of ‘Wicked,’ I wouldn’t have the family that I have, which is the most important thing in my life,” Maguire told Neuman on Wednesday. “I was able to do for these three motherless children what my father and my second mother had done for me, which was to give me the family that I didn’t come naturally into the world with.”

Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theater critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, Moore Media. He originally interviewed Gregory Maguire in 2005.

Pen and Podium/Coming up next

· When: Monday, Nov. 15, 7:30 p.m.

· Featured guest: Susan Orlean, journalist and author, “The Orchid Thief”

· Where: Newman Center for the Performing Arts, University of Denver

· Tickets: 303-871-7720 or penandpodium.com

OPTIONAL BREAKOUT

Hollywood has been beckoning Gregory Maguire for a film adaptation of “Wicked” ever since it was published in 1995. It was composer Stephen Schwartz who convinced Maguire to hold off until he could first turn the story into a Broadway musical that has now been seen by more than 40 million around the world. It took some convincing. But as soon as Schwartz pitched his opening song title – ”No One Mourns the Wicked” – Maguire was hooked.

“With those five words, he sealed the deal because he proved to me that he knew why I had written the book,” Maguire said. “That we demonize those with whom we disagree in order to give us the moral right to pick up stones and cudgels against them.”

After fits, starts, creative changes and a pandemic, a film version is now finally in the works. It will be directed by Jon M. Chu, who helmed the recent adaptation of “In the Heights.”

– John Moore