L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (born in Chittenango, New York, 1856; died in Hollywood, 1919) was an American writer best known for his children's fantasy novels, above all The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the first book of a series he kept writing for almost two decades. He wrote in English at a time when children's literature was becoming a commercial market in the United States. Beyond the Oz books he produced novels, short stories, poems and a number of scripts, and he repeatedly tried to bring his work to the stage and screen.

He grew up in a devout Methodist family of German, Scots-Irish and English descent. He was the seventh of nine children, and only five reached adulthood. His father, Benjamin Baum, earned his fortune in a series of ventures, from the oil fields of Pennsylvania to real estate, and the family lived at the Rose Lawn estate, a place Baum later remembered as something close to paradise. As a sickly, imaginative boy he had a short and unhappy stay at a military academy. He then turned to printing, stamp dealing and poultry breeding, the last of which led to his first book.

His real passion was the theatre. He worked as an actor, playwright and producer with uneven results, and more than once lost money on his ventures. After a stint in Dakota Territory, where he ran a store that eventually closed and edited a local weekly, he moved to Chicago. There he worked as a salesman and edited trade magazines about shop-window displays, an interest that shaped his visual imagination. His early books of prose rhymes, illustrated with W. W. Denslow, brought him modest success before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz appeared.

The novel follows Dorothy, carried by a cyclone into a magical land. Its style is plain and direct, with a humour that appeals to children and adults alike. The arid landscape of its opening chapters draws on the dry plains he had known in South Dakota. The book was a commercial and critical success and for two years was the best-selling children's book in the country. Baum went on writing Oz novels, and after his death the series was continued by other authors.

The story was adapted into a stage musical in 1902 and, decades later, into the 1939 film that became a landmark of twentieth-century cinema. His legacy is twofold: Oz has become part of American popular imagination, and his work helped establish fantasy for children as a genre with its own voice in US literature.