L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum was the creator of Oz — the most important and most enduring imaginary world in American children’s literature, a place as firmly embedded in the national consciousness as any real geography. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is the foundational American fairy tale, a story so deeply woven into the culture through Baum’s original book, its thirteen sequels, the 1939 Judy Garland film, and countless adaptations that its imagery — the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, the ruby slippers, the tornado, “There’s no place like home” — has become part of the American vernacular.

The Failed Businessman

Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, in 1856, the seventh of nine children in a prosperous family whose fortune came from oil fields in Pennsylvania. He was a sickly, imaginative child who devoured fairy tales and grew up with an ambition to write, though his path to authorship was spectacularly circuitous.

He tried, and failed at, a remarkable number of careers: poultry breeding (he raised Hamburg chickens and edited a trade journal called The Poultry Record), theatre (he wrote, produced, and starred in a melodrama called The Maid of Arran), retail (he ran a general store in Aberdeen, South Dakota, that went bankrupt), and journalism (he edited a newspaper in Aberdeen that also failed). He was a travelling salesman for a china company. He wrote a manual called The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors.

This litany of commercial failure is important because it shaped Baum’s vision of Oz: the Land of Oz is a place where no one is poor, where money does not exist, where abundance is the natural condition of life. Baum’s utopian fairy tale was written by a man who knew what it was like to go broke.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Chicago in 1899, working with the illustrator W.W. Denslow. The book was published by George M. Hill Company in May 1900 and was immediately successful, selling out its first printing and becoming the bestselling children’s book of the year.

The story — Dorothy Gale’s tornado-borne journey from Kansas to the magical Land of Oz, her encounters with the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, her quest to reach the Emerald City and appeal to the Wizard for help returning home — is deceptively simple. Baum consciously set out to create a distinctly American fairy tale, free of the violence and moralising that characterised European fairy tales. In his introduction, he wrote that the story aspired to be “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”

The result was something genuinely new: a fairy tale with an American landscape (Kansas, the prairie, the tornado), American values (self-reliance, friendship, the journey westward), and a distinctly American scepticism about authority — the Wizard turns out to be a humbug, a small man behind a curtain.

The Oz Series

Despite his stated intention to write only one Oz book, Baum was drawn back by popular demand — and financial necessity — to produce thirteen sequels: The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), The Road to Oz (1909), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), and so on through Glinda of Oz (1920, published posthumously).

The sequels are uneven — some are inventive and charming, others are formulaic — but collectively they build a remarkably detailed and internally consistent imaginary world. The geography of Oz is mapped, its political structure is defined (it is ruled by Princess Ozma, a benevolent monarch), and its population of fantastical characters — the Nome King, the Patchwork Girl, Tik-Tok the mechanical man, the Hungry Tiger — continues to expand.

After Baum’s death in 1919, the series was continued by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote nineteen additional Oz books, and later by other authors. The “Famous Forty” — Baum’s fourteen and Thompson’s nineteen, plus books by other “Royal Historians of Oz” — form the canonical Oz library.

Stage and Screen

Baum was fascinated by multimedia storytelling. He adapted The Wizard of Oz for the stage in 1902 (a hit musical that ran on Broadway and toured for years), experimented with hand-tinted lantern slides to accompany his readings, and in 1914 founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company to produce silent films based on his stories. The company was a commercial failure, but Baum’s ambition to tell stories across multiple media anticipated the modern entertainment franchise by nearly a century.

The 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, transformed the story into one of the most beloved films ever made, though its imagery — the ruby slippers (silver in the book), the sepia-to-Technicolor transition — is the film’s invention, not Baum’s.

Collecting Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (George M. Hill, 1900) in first edition, first state, with the Denslow illustrations and the correct binding points, is one of the most important and most valuable American children’s books. It is identified by the colophon on the copyright page reading “Geo. M. Hill Co.” The later Bobbs-Merrill editions are less valuable. The Marvelous Land of Oz (Reilly & Britton, 1904) is the first sequel and also collected. Baum’s extensive bibliography — he published under at least seven pseudonyms — offers a lifetime of bibliographic exploration.