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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
