L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York, a small village east of Syracuse. He disliked his first name and went by Frank for his entire life. His father, Benjamin Ward Baum, made a fortune in the Pennsylvania oil fields, and the family settled on a comfortable estate called Rose Lawn outside Syracuse, a place Frank later described with affection ^[1].

Baum was a frail child with a weak heart, a condition that shaped his upbringing. He was educated mostly at home, and a two-year stint at Peekskill Military Academy, beginning when he was twelve, ended badly: the drilling and discipline wore on him, and he returned to Rose Lawn ^[2]. His father then indulged the boy's enthusiasms. When Frank became fascinated with printing, Benjamin bought him a small press, and Frank and his younger brother Harry produced an amateur newspaper, the Rose Lawn Home Journal, filled with stories, verse, and local notices ^[1].

That pattern, intense enthusiasm followed by a new pursuit, defined his youth. As a teenager he published a journal for stamp collectors and later a trade paper devoted to fancy poultry, the breeding of which had briefly consumed him. His first book, published in 1886, was not a fantasy at all but a manual titled The Book of the Hamburgs, about raising a particular breed of chicken ^[2].

Anyone asking who was L. Frank Baum before Oz would find a restless man in his twenties and thirties cycling through careers. The theater claimed him first. He acted under stage names, managed a string of opera houses his father owned in New York and Pennsylvania, and in 1882 wrote and starred in a melodrama called The Maid of Arran, which toured with modest success ^[1]. That same year he married Maud Gage, a Cornell student and the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the leading suffragists in the country. Matilda's radical politics and interest in folklore would leave a lasting mark on her son-in-law ^[3].

Family fortunes declined after Benjamin Baum's death, and in 1888 Frank and Maud moved west to Aberdeen in Dakota Territory. There Baum opened a variety store, Baum's Bazaar, which failed within two years, in part because he extended too much credit to drought-stricken neighbors. He then bought a local weekly, the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, writing much of it himself, including a satirical column narrated by a fictional landlady ^[2]. The paper collapsed in 1891 as the regional economy sank, and the family, now with four sons, moved to Chicago.

In Chicago Baum worked as a newspaper reporter, then spent years as a traveling salesman for a china and glassware firm, a grinding job that damaged his health. He founded and edited The Show Window, a trade magazine for department store window dressers, and wrote a book on the subject, making him an early theorist of retail display ^[4]. Meanwhile, the bedtime stories he spun for his sons caught the attention of his mother-in-law, who urged him to write them down. Mother Goose in Prose appeared in 1897, and Father Goose: His Book, a collaboration with illustrator William Wallace Denslow, became one of the best-selling children's books of 1899 ^[1].

Baum and Denslow followed Father Goose with a full-length fantasy. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago in 1900, told the story of Dorothy, a Kansas farm girl carried by cyclone to a strange country where she gains three companions: a scarecrow who wants brains, a tin woodman who wants a heart, and a lion who wants courage ^[1]. Denslow's color illustrations were integral to the book's appeal, and the two men shared the copyright.

In his introduction Baum announced an ambition: a modernized fairy tale for American children, keeping the wonder of the old stories while leaving out, as he put it, the heartaches and nightmares. The book sold out its first printing quickly and became the best-selling children's book of its season ^[2]. Among the most cited L. Frank Baum facts is that a stage musical adaptation, opening in Chicago in 1902 and moving to Broadway in 1903, ran for years and made the story a national phenomenon well before any film version existed ^[4].

Baum had not planned a series. Reader demand, along with his own recurring financial pressures, pulled him back. The Marvelous Land of Oz appeared in 1904, and after attempts to close the series with The Emerald City of Oz in 1910, he relented and kept writing. Fourteen Oz books appeared under his name in all, the last, Glinda of Oz, published posthumously in 1920 ^[1].

Any honest survey of L. Frank Baum achievements starts with sheer output. Beyond the Oz series he wrote fantasies such as The Master Key (1901), The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), and Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), which some critics have judged his most polished fairy tale ^[2]. He was also remarkably prolific under pseudonyms. As Edith Van Dyne he wrote the popular Aunt Jane's Nieces series for adolescent girls, which sold in numbers rivaling the Oz books, and he published other work as Floyd Akers, Schuyler Staunton, Laura Bancroft, and additional pen names. Estimates of his total output run to more than fifty novels along with dozens of short stories and poems ^[4].

Baum was also a pioneer of multimedia storytelling. In 1908 he toured with the Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, an elaborate traveling show combining hand-tinted film, slides, live actors, and his own narration. The production was a technical novelty and a financial disaster; its debts forced him into bankruptcy in 1911, and he signed over royalties on many earlier books to his creditors ^[3]. Undeterred, he co-founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company in Los Angeles in 1914, producing several silent features based on his stories. The company folded within about a year, but it made Baum one of the first major authors to build a studio around his own creations ^[4].

His lasting achievement was Oz itself: a fully imagined secondary world with its own geography, history, and recurring cast, sustained across many volumes. Later writers of series fantasy for children worked in a form Baum had done much to establish in the United States ^[2].

Baum's marriage to Maud Gage Baum lasted from November 1882 until his death and was by most accounts the stable center of an unstable career. Maud managed the household finances, a necessity given Frank's habit of pouring earnings into risky ventures. The couple raised four sons: Frank Joslyn, Robert Stanton, Harry Neal, and Kenneth Gage ^[1].

The influence of Matilda Joslyn Gage on the household was considerable. She lived with the family for stretches, encouraged Baum's writing, and introduced the couple to Theosophy; Frank and Maud joined the Theosophical Society in Chicago in 1892 ^[3]. Scholars have connected Baum's interest in strong, capable girl heroines, from Dorothy onward, to the feminist convictions of his mother-in-law and his wife.

One episode continues to complicate his reputation. In December 1890, during his Aberdeen newspaper years and in the weeks around the Wounded Knee massacre, Baum published two editorials calling for the annihilation of the remaining Native Americans on the frontier. The editorials are well documented, and in 2006 two of his descendants publicly apologized to the Sioux for them ^[5]. Biographers continue to debate how to weigh those columns, with some reading them as bitter frontier rhetoric and others as plainly genocidal sentiment, but none dispute that he wrote them.

In 1910 the Baums moved permanently to Hollywood, then a quiet suburb of Los Angeles, where Maud used money inherited from her mother to build a house they named Ozcot ^[1]. Baum settled into a routine of morning writing in his garden, where he raised prize-winning dahlias and chrysanthemums and kept an aviary. He became a fixture of local clubs, including the Uplifters, a fraternal group of Los Angeles businessmen for whom he wrote comic entertainments ^[4].

The Hollywood years were productive despite the 1911 bankruptcy and the failure of his film company. He produced an Oz book nearly every year, along with the Aunt Jane's Nieces installments that paid many of the bills. His health, however, was deteriorating. The heart trouble that had shadowed him since childhood worsened, and he suffered from gallbladder disease; an operation in 1918 left him largely confined to bed ^[2].

He kept dictating and revising from his sickbed, completing the manuscripts published as The Magic of Oz and Glinda of Oz. Baum died at Ozcot on May 6, 1919, nine days short of his sixty-third birthday. Reports of his final hours, passed down through the family, have him murmuring about crossing the Shifting Sands, the desert that bounds Oz ^[1]. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Demand for Oz did not end with its creator. His publisher, Reilly and Lee, hired Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue the series, and she wrote more Oz books than Baum himself; other authors, including illustrator John R. Neill, extended the franchise for decades ^[2]. The 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, fixed the story in global popular culture, and its annual television broadcasts beginning in the 1950s introduced each new generation to Baum's characters ^[4].

Critical opinion of Baum has traveled a long road. For much of the twentieth century many librarians dismissed the Oz books as poorly written commercial fare, and some library systems declined to stock them. Reappraisal began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars and essayists, among them Gore Vidal in a pair of widely read New York Review of Books essays, argued for Baum's importance as an American mythmaker ^[6]. A 1964 article by teacher Henry Littlefield proposed reading the first Oz book as a parable of Populist-era monetary politics; historians have largely treated the theory as an interpretive exercise rather than Baum's intent, but it made the novel a classroom staple ^[7].

Any L. Frank Baum biography ultimately returns to a simple measure: the first Oz book has never gone out of print since 1900. It has been translated into scores of languages, adapted for stage productions from The Wiz to Wicked, and named by the Library of Congress among the most significant American books. Chittenango, his birthplace, holds an annual Oz festival, and Ozcot's former site in Hollywood is marked for tourists. Baum wanted to be remembered as a teller of tales who pleased children; on that count the verdict has been unusually clear ^[1].