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Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6,
1919) was an American author, and the creator with illustrator W. W.
Denslow of one of the most popular books ever written in American
children's literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
****
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 names of Louis F. Baum and George Brooks. 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 William Blacks' novel A Princess of Thule, 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
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. For several years he edited a magazine
for advertising agencies focused on window displays in stores. The major
department stores created elaborate Christmas time fantasies, using
clockwork mechanism that made it seem that people were moving. Children
thought it was magic, and adults wondered if there was not a man behind
the curtain pulling the levers. 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 1900, 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.
The book was heavily influenced by landmarks in Holland, Michigan where
he would stay with his great-grandfather. In fact, the Yellow Brick Road
was named after winding cobblestone roads in that town.
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"
in sharp contrast to the opening lines of the same editorial in which he
speaks respectfully of Sitting Bull and expressed contempt for the
behavior of white men toward him*) should be completely annihilated.
After the Massacre 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 contradictory
opinion points out that his overall writing is remarkably inclusive and
his characters diverse; though vocabulary was racist by today's
standards, he did, at least, acknowlege Americans of non-European
ancestry. And much of his writing, such as the short story, The
Enchanted Buffalo, which purports to be a Native American fable, speaks
with upmost respect for tribal peoples. It is unfortunate that these two
short editorials, written when he was ill and the community was living
in terror, continue to haunt his legacy.
"He was an Indian with a white man’s spirit
of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day
he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions:
forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working
and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors,
were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood
and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of
subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still
burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of
obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies. The proud spirit of the
original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of
fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom
of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is
extinguished..."
Was the Wizard of Oz a political allegory?
Many leading scholars, economists and
historians see the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable on politics
in the 1890s. Most of the major characters have clear allegorical
representations in the 1900 book, but not in later Oz books. On the
other hand fans of Baum reject the allegorical interpretation as
unworthy, unproven and inconsistent with Baum's legacy.
On the issue of WOZ as political allegory.
There are four issues:
1. The remarkable number of political
references that have been read into the 1900 book – as contrasted with
few in subsequent Oz books. Baum's supporters argue these are all
coincidences. Scholars argue that Baum had been a political editor in
the 1890s -- running an openly republican publication -- and was
thoroughly familiar with the politics of the day, which reached fever
pitch in the elections of 1896 and 1900, never equalled before or since
in American politics. Illustrator Denslow had been a editorial
cartoonist and was used to using animals and other characters to
represent political ideas. See the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz article
for examples of the political allegories Baum used, and the way
cartoonists saw the political aspect of his book.
2. In 1965 an article by Littlefield
interpreted WOZ as a Populist tract. Scholars think that Littlefield
correctly identified many of the political references, but many feel
that he was mistaken in saying that Baum was promoting Populism. The
value of the allegorical interpretation does not hinge on Littlefield’s
mistakes—he was a high school history teacher and was not a scholar of
politics, economics or the 1890s. In any case, those familiar with the
body of Baum's actual work, not writings by others decades after his
death, dismiss the proposal that Oz was a political statement.
3. Baum himself when asked if his stories
had hidden meanings. He consistently replied that he wrote to please
children and generate an income for his family. While, for example the
liberation of the little people when the Witch of the East is killed is
as political as anything in literature, the question is whether or not
this reflected the utopian dreams of the silverites who in 1896 did talk
about destroying the power of eastern industrialists.
4. Fans of all 14 Oz books emphasize there
are no political allegories in the books after the original WOZ of 1900.
They inists that tha Land of Oz, taken as a whole, is not a political
allegory. Political cartoonists have always recognized the allegories in
the first book, and of course the 1939 movie has strong New Deal
undertones that celebrate workers and farmers and ridiculed money
lenders like Miss Gulch. As a staunch Republican and avid supporter of
Womens' Suffrage, Baum personally did not support the political ideals
of either the Populist movement of 1890-92 or the Bryanite-silver
movement of 1896-1900. He published a poem in support of McKinley. But
there is no rule that says an author has to make a fairy tale comport
with his own policy views. The WOZ cleary says that silver slippers have
superior magic in them, and that the yellow brick road is dangerous.
Lovers of the Land of Oz should ignore the political allegory, as it
tends to ruin the stories for them. STudents of the 1890s, however, will
always celebrate the original book as the best expression of American
political debates ever captured in fiction.
Religion
Originally a Methodist, Baum joined the
Episcopal Church in Aberdeen in order to participate in community
theatricals. Later, he 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.
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.
John Ritter portayed Baum in a 1990 made
for TV movie, The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story. The film was
largely fiction, but retain some of the basic details of Baum's life
such as his the many failures of his adult life before Oz and a few of
the elements that inspired the books.
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by
expanding it.
For Oz books, please see: List of Oz books
Non-Oz works
The Maid of Arran (play, 1882)
The Book of Hamburgs (poultry guide, 1896)
By the Candelabra's Glare (poetry, 1897)
Mother Goose in Prose (prose retellings of
Mother Goose rhymes, (1897)
Father Goose: His Book (nonsense poetry,
1899)
The Army Alphabet (1900)
The Navy Alphabet (1900)
Songs of Father Goose (Father Goose, set to
music, 1900)
The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and
Interiors (Trade publication, 1900)
Dot and Tot of Merryland (fantasy, 1901)
American Fairy Tales (fantasy, 1901)
The Master Key: An Electric Fairy Tale
(fantasy, 1901)
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
(1902)
The Magical Monarch of Mo (fantasy, 1903)
(Originally published in 1900 as A New Wonderland)
The Enchanted Island of Yew (fantasy, 1903)
A Kidnapped Santa Claus (1904)
Queen Zixi of Ix (fantasy, 1905)
John Dough and the Cherub (fantasy, 1906)
The Sea Fairies (fantasy, 1911)
Sky Island (fantasy, 1912)
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
****
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