L. Frank Baum

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Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) was an American author, and the creator of one of the most popular books ever written in American children's literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

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Contents

Baum's childhood and early life

Frank was born in Chittenango, New York, into a family of German origin, the seventh of nine children born to Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Baum, only five of whom survived into adulthood. He was named "Lyman" after his father's brother, but always disliked this name, and preferred to go by "Frank". Benjamin Baum was a wealthy businessman, who had made his fortune in the oil fields of Pennsylvania. Frank grew up on his parents' expansive estate, Rose Lawn, which he always remembered fondly as a sort of paradise. As a young child Frank was tutored at home with his siblings, but at the age of 12 he was sent to study at Peekskill Military Academy. Frank was a sickly child given to daydreaming, and his parents may have thought he needed toughening up. But after two utterly miserable years at the military academy, following an incident described as a heart attack, he was allowed to return home.

Frank started writing at an early age, perhaps due to an early fascination with printing. His father bought him a cheap printing press, and Frank used it to produce The Rose Lawn Home Journal with the help of his younger brother, Harry Clay Baum, with whom he had always been close. The brothers published several issues of the journal and were even able to sell ads. By the time he was 17, Baum had established a second amateur journal, The Stamp Collector, printed an 11-page pamphlet called Baum's Complete Stamp Dealers' Directory, and started a stamp dealership with his friends.

At about the same time Frank embarked upon his lifetime infatuation with theater and the performing arts, a devotion which would repeatedly lead him to failure and near-bankruptcy. His first such failure occurred at age 18, when a local theatrical company duped him into replenishing their stock of costumes, with the promise of leading roles that never came his way. Disillusioned, Baum left the theatre—temporarily—and went to work as a clerk in his brother-in-law's dry goods company in Syracuse.

At the age of 20, Baum took on a new vocation: the breeding of fancy poultry, which was a national craze at the time. He specialized in raising a particular breed of fowl, the Hamburg chicken. In 1880 he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record, and in 1886, when Baum was 30 years old, his first book was published: The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.

Yet Baum could never stay away from the stage long. He continued to take roles in plays, performing under the stage name of Louis F. Baum. In 1880 his father made him manager of a string of theaters that he owned, and Baum set about writing plays and gathering a company to act in them. The Maid of Arran, a melodrama based on a popular novel, proved a great success. Baum not only wrote the play but composed songs for it, and acted in the leading role.

On November 9, 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a famous women's suffrage activist.

The South Dakota years

In July 1888 Baum and his wife moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he opened a store, "Baum's Bazaar". His habit of giving out wares on credit led to the eventual bankrupting of the store, so Baum turned to editing a local newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, where he wrote a famous column, "Our Landlady". Baum's description of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is based on his experiences in drought-ridden South Dakota.

Baum becomes an author

Image:Baum poster 1b.jpg After Baum's newspaper failed in 1891, he and his family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where Baum took a job reporting for the Evening Post, as well as a job selling china door-to-door. In 1897 he wrote and published Mother Goose in Prose a collection of Mother Goose rhymes written as prose stories, and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. Mother Goose was a moderate success, and allowed Baum to quit his door-to-door job.

In 1899 Baum partnered with illustrator W. W. Denslow, to publish Father Goose: His Book, a collection of nonsense poetry. The book was a success, becoming the best selling children's book of the year.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

In 1901, Baum and Denslow (with whom he shared the copyright) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical and financial acclaim. The book was the bestselling children's book for two years after its initial publication. Baum went on to write thirteen other novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz.

Two years after Wizard's publication, Baum and Denslow teamed up with composer Paul Tietjens and director Julian Mitchell to produce a musical stage version of the book. It ran on Broadway 293 stage nights from 1902 to 1911, and also successfully toured the United States. The stage version starred Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone as the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow respectively, which shot the pair to instant fame at the time. The stage version differed quite a bit from the book, and was aimed primarily at adults. Toto was replaced with Imogene the Cow, and Tryxie Tryfle, a waitress and Pastoria, a streetcar operator were added as fellow cyclone victims.

Later life and work

With the success of Wizard, Baum and Denslow hoped lightning would strike a third time and in 1901 published Dot and Tot of Merryland. The book was one of Baum's weakest, and its failure further strained his faltering relationship with Denslow. It would be their last collaboration.

Several times during the development of the Oz series, Baum declared that he had written his last Oz book and devoted himself to other works of fantasy fiction based in other magical lands, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Queen Zixi of Ix. However, persuaded by popular demand, letters from children, and the failure of his new books, he returned to the series each time. All of his novels have fallen into public domain in most jurisdictions, and many are available through Project Gutenberg.

Later in life Baum was plagued with debt and illness. Because of his lifelong love of theatre, he often financed elaborate musicals, often to his financial detriment. One of Baum's worst financial endevors was his Fairylogues and Radio Plays (1908), which combined a slideshow, film, and live actors with a lecture by Baum as if he were giving a travelogue to Oz. However, Baum ran into trouble and could not pay his debts to the company who produced the films, and did not get back to a stable financial situation until almost a decade later, after he sold the royalty rights to many of earlier works, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

His final book, Glinda of Oz was published a year after his death in 1920 but the Oz series was continued long after his death by other authors, notably Ruth Plumly Thompson who wrote an additional nineteen Oz books. Baum made use of several pseudonyms for some of his other, non-Oz books. They include:

  • Edith Van Dyne (the Aunt Jane's Nieces series)
  • Laura Bancroft (Twinkle and Chubbins, Policeman Bluejay)
  • Floyd Akers (the Sam Steele series)
  • Suzanne Metcalf (Annabel)
  • Schuyler Staunton (Daughters of Destiny)
  • John Estes Cooke
  • Capt. Hugh Fitzgerald

Baum also anonymously wrote The Last Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile.

Baum died on May 6, 1919 and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.

Baum's beliefs

Politics

During the events leading up to the Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum wrote a racist editorial for the Saturday Pioneer stating that the Native Americans (whom he described as "whining curs") should be completely annihilated. After the Massacre (during which, according to official figures, 153 Indians out of a village of 350—including 230 women and children—were directly killed, with an unknown number of others later dying as a result of their forced displacement) he wrote a second editorial repeating his earlier opinion and criticizing the government for not taking even harsher measures: "wipe these... untamable creatures from the face of the earth". It should be noted that these editorials are the only known occasion on which Baum expressed such views, and that he wrote them when his own fortunes were declining. Some of Baum's work as a children's author, including two of his Oz books, have been criticized for perpetuating racist stereotypes about African Americans.

A common misconception is that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a parable on populism in the sense of bimetallism. Nothing in Baum's biography or style supports this notion, though there are some suggestive parallels between the book and certain historic figures.

Religious beliefs

Originally an Episcopalian, Baum and his wife became theosophists, in 1897. Baum's beliefs are often reflected in his writing. The only mention of a church in the Oz books is the porcelain one which Dorothy knocks over in the China Country in The Wizard of Oz. The Baums also sent their older sons to "Ethical Culture Sunday School" in Chicago, which taught morality but not religion.

Miscellaneous anecdotes

  • When the wardrobe department of MGM began to buy costumes for the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz, they purchased second hand clothes from rummage sales around Hollywood. Actor Frank Morgan who played the Wizard, was given one such second-hand overcoat to wear, and he happened to notice that the lining of the coat had a label saying, "Property of L. Frank Baum". In early publicity for the movie, MGM emphasized that this was a true story. Soon after the movie was released, the coat was taken to Baum's wife, who confirmed that it had been his.[1]
  • A very popular myth about the origin of the name "Oz" is that it was inspired by the labels on the author's filing cabinet: A-N, O-Z. Less popular is the myth that it stood for the abbreviation for "ounce". However, according to the International Wizard of Oz Club, L. Frank Baum's widow, Maud, once wrote to writer Jack Snow on this subject and stated that it was just a name that Frank had created out of his own mind.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

For Oz books, please see: List of Oz books

Non-Oz works

Under pseudonyms

As Edith Van Dyne:
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces (1906)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad (1906)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville (1908)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work (1906)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society (1910)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John (1911)
  • The Flying Girl (1911)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation (1912)
  • The Flying Girl and Her Chum (1912)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces on the Ranch (1913)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West (1914)
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross (1915, republished in 1918)
  • Mary Louise (1916)
  • Mary Louise in the Country (1916)
  • Mary Louise Solves a Mystery (1916)
  • Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls (1918)
  • Mary Louise Adopts a Soldier (1919)
As Laura Bancroft:
  • The Twinkle Tales (1906)
  • Policeman Bluejay (1907)
Anonymous:
  • The Last Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile (1908)

References

  • Baum, Frank Joslyn & MacFall, Russell P. (1961) To Please a Child. Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co.
  • Rogers, Katharine M. (2002) L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz. St. Martin's Press ISBN 031230174X
  • Riley, Michael O. (1997) Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. University of Kansas Press ISBN 0-7006-0832-X

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Wikisource has original works written by or about:


The world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Oz portal
The land | The characters (including Dorothy and The Wizard) | The books
The authors (Baum | Thompson | McGraw | Volkov) | The illustrators (Denslow | Neill)
The film adaptations (The Wizard of Oz | The Wiz | Return to Oz)
Wicked (The books | The musical)
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