L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum, who preferred to be called Frank, was born in Chittenango, New York, on May 15, 1856, and died on May 6, 1919. He became one of America’s best-known writers of children’s fantasy, above all for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the larger Oz series. His career was unusually busy and varied: in addition to the 14 Oz books, he wrote 41 other novels, 83 short stories, more than 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts.

Baum grew up in a devout Methodist family, the seventh of nine children of Cynthia Ann and Benjamin Ward Baum. Only five of the children survived into adulthood. His father succeeded in several businesses, including barrel-making, oil drilling in Pennsylvania, and real estate, and Baum spent part of his childhood on the family estate, Rose Lawn, in Mattydale, New York. He remembered it fondly as a kind of paradise. A sickly and dreamy child, he was tutored at home with his siblings. After two years at Peekskill Military Academy, where he was severely disciplined for daydreaming, he suffered a possibly psychogenic heart attack and returned home.

Writing and publishing came early. His father bought him a cheap printing press, and Baum and his younger brother Henry, known as Harry, produced The Rose Lawn Home Journal, even carrying advertisements from local businesses. By 17, Baum had started another amateur journal, The Stamp Collector, printed a stamp dealers’ directory, and helped run a stamp dealership with friends. At 20, he turned to poultry breeding, specializing in the Hamburg chicken. In 1880 he founded The Poultry Record, and in 1886 his first book appeared: The Book of the Hamburgs.

The stage was another lasting pull. Baum acted under the names Louis F. Baum and George Brooks, wrote plays, composed songs, and performed in leading roles. In 1880 his father built him a theater in Richburg, New York, where The Maid of Arran, a melodrama with songs based on William Black’s A Princess of Thule, had modest success. In 1882 he married Maud Gage, daughter of the women’s suffrage and feminist activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. A local newspaper described their ceremony as “one of equality,” with marriage vows that were “precisely the same.”

After setbacks in theater, Baum moved west with Maud. In 1888 they settled in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, opened Baum’s Bazaar, and later, after the store failed, he edited and published The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Those years included disturbing newspaper columns: after the death of Sitting Bull, Baum recommended the wholesale extermination of all America’s native peoples, and he returned to the subject after the Wounded Knee Massacre. The source notes that it is unclear whether he meant the first column as satire, especially given Matilda Joslyn Gage’s honorary adoption into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation and her defense of Native American rights.

Baum later moved to Chicago, worked as a newspaper reporter, and published children’s literature. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz appeared in 1900 and became the book most closely tied to his name. He repeatedly tried to bring his work to stage and screen, and among his final projects he sought to establish a film studio in Los Angeles. Long after his death, the 1939 adaptation of the first Oz book became a landmark of 20th-century cinema. His fiction also imagined things that later became common, including television, augmented reality, laptop computers, wireless telephones, women in high-risk and action-heavy occupations, and advertising on clothing. That mix of play, invention, and showmanship is why Baum’s work still feels alive to readers.