Aberdeen's literary association is mostly with L. Frank Baum, who lived here from 1888 to 1891. The Oz books are not really about Aberdeen, but Baum's experience of the drought-stricken Dakota plains shaped the grey, windswept Kansas of the opening chapters.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — Baum wrote and published The Wizard of Oz a decade after leaving Aberdeen, but the bleak, dust-blown Kansas of the opening chapters is essentially Brown County in the drought years of 1889–1890. He had watched his variety store fail and his town crumble; the contrast between the grey homestead and the technicolor Emerald City is, on one reading, the contrast between what the plains were and what railroad-era boosters had promised they would become.
A short, strange, and stranger-than-you-remember book if you have only seen the film. Read it before driving Storybook Land's yellow brick road.