(The story chronicles the adventures of a young farm girl ...)
The story chronicles the adventures of a young farm girl named Dorothy in the magical Land of Oz, after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their Kansas home by a cyclone.
(Queen Zixi of Ix, or The Story of the Magic Cloak, is a c...)
Queen Zixi of Ix, or The Story of the Magic Cloak, is a children's book written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Frederick Richardson. It was originally serialized in the early 20th-century American children's magazine St. Nicholas from November 1904 to October 1905, and was published in book form later in 1905 by The Century Company. The events of the book alternate between Noland and Ix, two neighboring regions to the Land of Oz
(Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz was a newspa...)
Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz was a newspaper comic strip written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Walt McDougall, a political cartoonist for the Philadelphia North American. Queer Visitors appeared in the North American, the Chicago Record-Herald and other newspapers from 28 August 1904 to 26 February 1905. The series chronicles the misadventures of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Woggle-Bug, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Sawhorse, as the Gump flies them to various cities in the United States. The comic strip in turn produced its own derivation, The Woggle-Bug Book (1905).
(The Woggle-Bug Book is a 1905 children's book, written by...)
The Woggle-Bug Book is a 1905 children's book, written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Ike Morgan. It grew out of the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz comic strip of 1904-5. It is generally not considered part of the Oz canon.
(This is the fifth of L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz books. Do...)
This is the fifth of L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz books. Dorothy and Toto are off again on an exciting adventure down The Road to Oz! In order to help the lovable, ever-wandering Shaggy Man, Dorothy and Toto must journey through magical and mysterious lands. Soon the three are joined by a lost lad named Button-Bright and the beautiful young Polychromethe Rainbow's Daughter. With magic at work and danger about, these new friends must journey through cities of talking beasts, across the Deadly Desert into the Truth Pond, and through many other strange and incredible places before they can reach the Emerald City.
(The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum is a children's...)
The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum is a children's novel, the 7th set in the Land of Oz. Characters include the Woozy, Ojo "the Unlucky", Unc Nunkie, Dr. Pipt, Scraps (the patchwork girl), and others.
(The Scarecrow of Oz is the ninth book set in the Land of ...)
The Scarecrow of Oz is the ninth book set in the Land of Oz written by L. Frank Baum. It was Baum's personal favorite of the Oz books and tells of Cap'n Bill and Trot journeying to Oz and, with the help of the Scarecrow, overthrowing the cruel King Krewl of Jinxland. Cap'n Bill and Trot (Mayre Griffiths) had previously appeared in two other novels by Baum, The Sea Fairies and Sky Island.
(After Rob has filled his workshop and whole house with el...)
After Rob has filled his workshop and whole house with electrical pranks and nuisances, he is thunderstruck at the appearance of a strange being the Demon of Electricity, called into existence because Rob has stumbled upon the Master Key!
Equipped with new, seemingly magical abilities, Rob flies away - literally - on his way to perilous adventures, in this fairy tale of electricity, from the pen of the famous author of the Oz books.
(The Tin Woodman of Oz: A Faithful Story of the Astonishin...)
The Tin Woodman of Oz: A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, Assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter is the twelfth Land of Oz book.
(The Magic of Oz: A Faithful Record of the Remarkable Adve...)
The Magic of Oz: A Faithful Record of the Remarkable Adventures of Dorothy and Trot and the Wizard of Oz, Together with the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger and Cap'n Bill, in Their Successful Search for a Magical and Beautiful Birthday Present for Princess Ozma of Oz is the thirteenth Land of Oz book.
(Volume 1: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land ...)
Volume 1: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz;
Volume 2: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, The Emerald City of Oz;
Volume 3: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz;
Volume 4: Rinkitink in Oz, The Lost Princess of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz;
Volume 5: The Magic of Oz, Glinda of Oz, The Royal Book of Oz.
also known asLyman Frank Baum, George Brooks, Louis F. Baum, Laura Bancroft, Suzanne Metcalf, Capt. Hugh Fitzgerald, Schuyler Staunton, Edith Van Dyne, Floyd Akers, John Estes Cooke
Lyman Frank Baum, better known as L. Frank Baum, was an American editor, screenwriter, film producer, actor and author of books for children, particularly known for the popular Wizard of Oz series. The work has been produced as movies, theatrical plays, and musicals and continues to fascinate and enchant to this day.
Background
Ethnicity:
L. Frank Baum had German, Scots-Irish and English ancestry.
Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York, United States; the seventh of nine children of Cynthia Ann (née Stanton) and Benjamin Ward Baum. Only five of his siblings survived into adulthood.
Frank’s father was a wealthy oil businessman, and young Frank (who disliked his first name and never used it) grew up in comfort on his parents' expansive estate called Rose Lawn.
Education
Of delicate health, Frank was tutored at home with his siblings. In 1868, he was enrolled in Peekskill Military Academy but after a health crisis two years later, he returned home. Never earning a high school degree, he spent his early adulthood exploring his interest in acting and writing for the stage.
Frank’s initial attempt at writing and publishing began during his teenage years. He published different monthly newspapers. One of them, The Rose Lawn Home Journal, contained articles, editorials, fiction, poetry, and word games and did well, as even some of the local stores bought advertisement space for their services. In 1873, Frank started a new paper called The Empire as well as The Stamp Collector, a magazine not surprisingly for stamp collectors.
Later Frank became interested in chickens. With the help of his father and brother Harry, he began to breed Hamburgs, small colorful birds which were popular at the time and they soon won awards. Frank then began a new magazine called The Poultry Record. His first book was published in 1886 and was called The Book of Hamburgs, A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.
In addition to his editorial career, Baum’s most influential interest was the theatre. At first, he thought that his career was to be an actor. He joined Albert M. Palmer’s Union Square Theater in New York and took the pen names of Louis F. Baum and George Brooks. Benjamin Baum, his father, who owned a string of opera houses in New York and Pennsylvania, must have seen his son’s enthusiasm and love of the theatre, for he made him the manager of them in 1880 and eventually they were given to him after he proved himself worthy.
After whetting his thirst for the theatre and seeing what delighted the audiences, Frank set to work on writing original plays. One of his plays, The Maid of Arran, was a surprise smash hit, and Frank and his company toured with it throughout the United States and Canada in the early 1880s. Baum gave up acting when his wife, Maud, became pregnant with their first child and all the scenery, props, and costumes for The Maid of Arran were destroyed in a fire. He worked for a time in the family oil business in Syracuse, still writing plays in his spare time, none of which were produced.
In 1888 the Baums moved to the Dakota Territory, where Baum worked for a time as a shopkeeper of "Baum's Bazaar" and then as an editor of the local newspaper The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, enjoying both jobs but failing financially in each. By 1891 it was clear that his growing family, now with four sons, required that he find a job that would provide financial stability. They moved to Chicago, where he was first a newspaper reporter for the Evening Post, but soon took a better paying job as a traveling salesman with a crockery firm. Beginning in 1897, he founded and edited a magazine called The Show Window, later known as the Merchants Record and Show Window, which focused on store window displays, retail strategies and visual merchandising.
At the suggestion of his mother-in-law, Baum began to write down some of the stories he made up to tell his sons every evening when he was home. One of these stories, Mother Goose in Prose, was published in 1897. The book sold well, and, on the advice of his doctor, Baum gave up his traveling job. Instead, he became the editor of a journal for window-dressers, which also did well.
Baum next decided to collaborate on a children's book with a friend, the artist W. W. Denslow. Father Goose, His Book, published in 1899, was a best-seller. One of the five books he published in 1900, also based on stories he had told his sons and illustrated by Denslow, was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which immediately broke records for sales and made Baum a celebrity.
At the suggestion of his publisher, Baum's book, with substantial changes to fit the theatrical tastes of the day, was made into a musical in 1902, which also was a great success and toured the United States for years. A second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, a clever satire on the women's suffrage movement, was published in 1904 and was very popular, and other Oz books followed, though none matched the originality or sales of the first two books.
In addition, over the next two decades he wrote over 35 non-Oz books under various pseudonyms and aimed at various audiences. Most of these were "pot-boilers," but they did well financially and helped make Baum a wealthy man.
Always looking for new outlets for his creativity, Baum became interested in films. In 1909 he founded a company to produce hand-colored slides featuring characters from his Oz books. These were shown while he narrated and an orchestra played background music. Although highly innovative, these "radio-plays," as he called them, lost a great deal of money, and in June 1911 he was forced to declare bankruptcy. A later venture into the film business, the Oz Film Company in 1914, produced six movies but experienced severe distribution problems and also failed, though not as disastrously.
Using money Maud had inherited from her mother, the Baums moved to Hollywood, California, in 1910 for Frank's health, and there built Ozcot, a large home with an impressive garden. Here he produced additional Oz books, to a total of 14, which helped ease his financial problems. But with most of his fortune gone and his health failing, in his later years Baum lived quietly at Ozcot, gardening, writing stories, and answering the hundreds of letters he received from Oz-struck children. After a protracted illness in his gall-bladder and a 24 hour coma, he died on May 6, 1919.
Baum was originally a Methodist, but he joined the Episcopal Church in Aberdeen to participate in community theatricals. Later, he and his wife were encouraged by Matilda Joslyn Gage to become members of the Theosophical Society in 1892.
Politics
Baum was a Republican, and it is thought that he did not support the political ideals of either the Populist movement of 1890–92 or the Bryanite-silver crusade of 1896–1900. He published a poem in support of William McKinley.
Views
Baum’s wife, Maud Gage, was a daughter of the noted feminist and suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage. Frank had a warm relationship with his mother-in-law, who, along with his new wife, helped him become a lifelong suffragist and feminist. In fact, most of his books had girls as the heroes. Baum was the secretary of Aberdeen's Woman's Suffrage Club.
Quotations:
"When I was a boy I was tremendously interested in scarecrows. They always seemed to my childish imagination as just about to wave their arms, straighten up and stalk across the field on their long legs. I lived on a farm, you know. It was natural then that my first character in this animated life series was the scarecrow, on whom I have taken revenge for all the mystic feeling he once inspired. Then came the Tin Woodman, named because of the oddity of a Woodman made of tin, and then Pumpkinhead, and now, of course, the Wogglebug."
"Now we can cross the Shifting Sands."
"When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward."
"Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it."
"As the years pass, and we look back on something which, at the time, seemed unbelievably discouraging and unfair, we come to realize that, after all, God was at all times on our side. The eventual outcome was, we discover, by far the best solution for us, and what we thought should have been to our best advantage, would in reality have been quite detrimental."
Personality
Early on Frank demonstrated his resourcefulness, drive and creativity. Throughout his life, Frank's interests were varied and he did well at most things he attempted. He was always productive with his time and energy and was never idle.
In addition to the Oz series, Baum wrote other books for children and teenagers, including romances and science fiction, under an assortment of pen names. Under the name Edith Van Dyne, he wrote a successful series of books called Aunt Jane’s Nieces that were as popular as the Oz books. Other pseudonyms included Laura Bancroft, Floyd Akers, Schuyler Staunton, and Capt. Hugh Fitzgerald.
Baum’s final words were in reference to Oz. Just before he passed, he had some interesting last words for his wife. In his books, the land of Oz is cut off from the rest of the world by impassable wastelands, including a desert called the Shifting Sands. As Baum lay dying, he supposedly referenced the work that made his legacy: “Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.”
Physical Characteristics:
A rather sickly since his childhood, throughout his life, Frank’s health was a constant impediment, which became a looming presence and a major controlling factor. Although, it never impeded his creativity, drive and talent.
Connections
On November 9, 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, a daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a famous women's suffrage and feminist activist. A sophomore at Cornell University, Maud made a significant sacrifice when she accepted Frank's marriage proposal. She was twenty, and he was twenty-five. Maud's mother initially disapproved of Maud's marrying Frank.
In many respects, Frank and Maud were exact opposites. She was headstrong, strong-willed and temperamental. Frank, on the other hand, was low key, optimistic, even-tempered and whimsical. Maud soon took over the family finances and the role of disciplinarian, for it was known that these were not Frank's strong suits.
The marriage produced four children including Frank Joslyn Baum and Harry Neal Baum.
The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum
In the first major literary biography of L. Frank Baum, Rebecca Loncraine tells the story of Oz as you've never heard it, with a look behind the curtain at the vivid life and eccentric imagination of its creator.
2009
Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story
Finding Oz tells the remarkable tale behind one of the world's most enduring and best loved stories. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum's 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum's fantastical parable of the American Dream.
2009
The Road to Oz: Twists, Turns, Bumps, and Triumphs in the Life of L. Frank Baum
The book traces the life of L. Frank Baum from his dreamy privileged childhood in mid-19th-century upstate New York through the many detours on his road to Oz. A failure as an actor, a breeder of prize chickens, a merchant in a wild west town, among other occupations, he finally made a success doing exactly what he had always loved to do: tell stories for children. Along the way, we see the antecedents of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, green glasses, and other characters and attributes of the famous fantasy land. This is the first biography of L. Frank Baum that children can enjoy.
L. Frank Baum: Creator Of Oz
Katharine M. Rogers at long last gives Baum the man and Baum the writer his due in a book Library Journal enthusiastically recommends "for all who love the marvelous land of Oz."