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Frank Baum Biography and List of Works

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American journalist and writer, whose best-known book is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Baum's stories about the imaginary Land of Oz belong to the classics of fantasy literature. The Oz series was long shunned by librarians, and neglected by scholars of children's literature. Baum has often been compared to Lewis Carroll - they both had a girl as a protagonist in their most famous works.

"Yet the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as 'historical' in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer 'wonder tales' in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident."
(Baum in the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

L. Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, as the son of the oil magnate Benjamin Ward Baum and Cynthia (Stanton) Baum, a women's rights activist. He was privately tutored at home and spent two years at Peekskill Military Academy (1868-69).

In 1873 Barrie became a reporter on the New York World. Two years later he founded the New Era weekly in Pennsylvania. He was a poultry farmer with B.W. Baum and Son and edited Poultry Record and wrote columns for New York Farmer and Dairyman. In New York Baum acted as George Brooks with May Roberts and the Sterling Comedy in plays which he had written. He owned an opera house in 1882-83, and toured with his own repertory company. In 1882 he married Maud Gage; they had four sons.

Baum returned in 1883 to Syracuse to the family oil business and worked as a salesman in Baum's Ever-Ready Castorine axle grease. His own endeavor was not successful - Baum's Bazaar general store failed in South Dakota, and from 1888 to 1890 he ran the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. He moved to Chicago, and tried sales positions. In 1897 he founded National Association of Window Trimmers and edited Show Window from 1897 to 1902.

Baum made his debut as a novelist with Mother Goose in Prose (1897). It was based on stories told to his own children. Its last chapter introduced the farm-girl Dorothy. In 1899 appeared Father Goose: His Book, which quickly became a bestseller. Baum's next work was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a story of little Dorothy from Kansas who is transported by a 'twister' to a magical realm. The book, which was illustrated and decorated by W.W. Denslow, was published at Baum's own expense.

"Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow -
Why then, oh why can't I?"
('Over the the Rainbow' in The Wizard of Oz, lyrics by Edgar Y. Harburg)

The first of the Oz books was made into a musical in 1901. Since its appearance the story has been filmed many times. Other novels in the series were The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908), The Road to Oz (1909), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), Glinda of Oz (1920), and The Visitors from Oz, which was adapted from a comic strip by Baum and appeared in 1960. Baum's former illustrator W.W. Denslow produced stories with Oz characters in the early 1900s. In 1914-15 Baum was the founding director of Oz Film Manufacturing Company (later Dramatic Features Company) in Los Angeles.

"'All the same,' said the Scarecrow, 'I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.'
'I shall take the heart,' returned the Tin Woodman; 'for brains do not make one happy, and happiness in the best thing in the world.'"
(from The Wizard of Oz)

During his career Baum wrote more than 60 books, some of them for adults, including The Last Egyptian (1908). He gathered material for works aimed at teenagers during his motoring tours across the country and travels in Europe and Egypt.

Born with a congenitally weak heart, Baum was ill through much of his life. He died on May 6, 1919, in Hollywood, where he had moved to a house he called Ozcot. The Oz series was continued by other writers, among them Ruth Plumly Thompson and Baum's great-grand son Roger Baum.

For further reading: The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was by M. Gardner and R.B. Nye (1957); An introduction to The Wizard of Oz by Donald Wollheim (1965); Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land by Raylyn Moore (1974); The Wizard of Oz, ed. by Michael Patrick Hearn (1983); The Wizard of Oz by John Fricke, Jay Scarfone and William Stillman (1989); The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie (1992) - - See also: Lewis Carroll

Film adaptations: Dorothy and the Scarecrow of Oz (1910); The Land of Oz (1910); The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914); His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1914); The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914); The Ragged Girl of Oz (1919); The Wizard of Oz (1939); Return to Oz (1964); The Wizard of Mars (1964); Journey Back to OZ (1971); The Wiz (1978); The Wizard of Oz (1982); Return to Oz (1985); The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (1987) - Note: The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz was not well received. It achieved its present status after TV showings in the 1950s - see for further information The Making of the Wizard of Oz (1978)

Wizard of Oz - film adaptation 1939. Dorothy (Judy Garland) is knocked unconscious during a Tornado. She wakes up in Munchkin Land where the good witch Glinda (Billie Burke) gives her a pair of ruby slippers and refers her to the omnipotent Wizard (Frank Morgan). She starts the journey on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City and meets a scarecrow (Ray Bolger) in search of a brain, a tin man (Jack Haley) seeking a heart and cowardly lion (Bert Lahr) in need of courage. The Wizard agrees to help them if they secure the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton). When Dorothy and her dog Toto are captured, her three companions try to save her and the witch is destroyed. The wizard proves to be a phoney but her friends have found the qualities they sought through their own endeavours. Dorothy is then told to click her slippers together and utter the words 'There is no place like home' and is returned to Kansas. - The film can be interpreted in many ways. It is a search for happiness at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, in Oz it represents Hollywood, to which teenage girls dream of running, in hopes of breaking into movies, Dorothy's journey can be seen as a young girl's last childhood experience, and when she chooses to return home to Kansas, she has matured into a young woman. Baum wanted the children to see that the traditional American values of integrity, self-reliance, candour, and courage would make them succeed despite obstacles. Many of his stories carry a pacifist plea for tolerance between people.

"The idea of starting the film in black-and-white, then going into colour when we reached Oz, and back to black-and-white again for the return to Kansas, was mine. For a while, though, I wished I had never thought of it. It created huge problems. The make-up mad to be different for the black-and-white portions, but that was a relatively minor matter. What caused the biggest difficulty was the actual moment of transition. Each frame of film had to be hand painted to make the change from black-and-white to colour a smooth one."
(Mervyn LeRoy in Take One, 1974)

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