We spent a few posts looking at the world around The Wonderful Wizard of Oz rather than just he world confined to the page, because I firmly believe we have to understand everything about the book, the author, and the society and history around all of it to truly understand the nuances and messages we are supposed to take away as readers.
Today, let us take a look at a brief history of L. Frank Baum to learn a little bit more about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The life and times of the literature wizard
We know quite a bit about Baum from his work at the newspaper and through correspondences throughout his life. He was a creative but complicated force (as were most of the people from his era due to inept racial attitudes). Baum was born Lyman Frank Baum on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. As mentioned in a previous post, this was a time of change in America (or at least it would be soon enough) as the turn of the century loomed.
Baum started his writing career in Aberdeen, South Dakota, as an editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer.
โThe newspaper is both the reason for, and the product of, the only period in Baumโs life when his energies were channeled solely into the creation of nonfiction materials for a general adult reading audienceโ
(Koupal)
This quote makes perfect sense because Baum would spend most of his life writing fictional childrenโs literature in the wonderful world of Oz. Before heading down the road of literary immortality, however, Baum attempted many other professions, including โeditor and printer of an amateur magazine, Rose Lawn Home Journal โฆ reporter for the New York World; printer for New Era โฆ manager of a string of vaudeville houses in New York and Pennsylvania, author, writer, composer, and director of Irish musical comedies and melodies โฆโ and a whole lot more (Sale).
โI think a lot of the things that he did were trying to see what was popular and trying for himself to profit from that,โ said creator of the documentary American Oz. โโฆ I think that comes through all the different things that he did, including in Chicago when he started the magazine about window dressing show windowsโ (Rockett).
As such, after relocating and working in Chicago, Baumโs published his first book Father Goose (1899), which was went on to be successful, and the next year he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
โBaum wrote 13 more Oz books, and the series was continued by another after his death. Using a variety of pseudonyms as well as his own name, Baum wrote some 60 books, the bulk of them juveniles that were popular in their dayโ
(Britannica)
Works Cited
KOUPAL, NANCY TYSTAD. โTHE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF THE WEST: L. FRANK BAUM IN SOUTH DAKOTA, 1888-91.โ Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, 1989, pp. 203โ215. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23531112. Accessed 23 July 2021.
โL. Frank Baum | American Author.โ Encyclopedia Britannica, britannica.com/biography/L-Frank-Baum.
Rockett, Darcel. โโAmerican Ozโ: L. Frank Baum Doc Traces โWizard of Oz,โ โWickedโ Roots to Authorโs Formative Chicago Years.โ Chicagotribune.Com, 19 Apr. 2021, chicagotribune.com/entertainment/what-to-watch/ct-ent-l-frank-baum-wizard-of-oz-american-experience-0419-20210419-r7ftmrzvtrejleq2hz56sbp5ge-story.html.
Sale, Roger. โL. Frank Baum, and Oz.โ The Hudson Review, vol. 25, no. 4, 1972, pp. 571โ592. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3850065. Accessed 23 July 2021.
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