Lyman Frank Baum
Wizard of Oz
The American Fairy Tale

Lyman Frank Baum created The Wizard of Oz, a well known American Fairy Tale.

One of the treasures you'll find at the Project Gutenberg library is a digital version of 14 books set in the land of Oz. These classic children's fairy books were written between 1900 and L.Frank Baum's death in 1919.

Teaming with artist William Wallace Denslow, Baum created The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first book in the series.

Though Denslow contributed significantly toward the unique characters of Oz, a falling out between him and Baum led to subsequent books in the series being illustrated by other artists, including John Rea Neill and Walt McDougall.

Lyman Frank Baum was born in 1856 into a wealthy New York family. A rather sickly child, he was given to daydreaming, and though a brief, abortive stint in military school attempted to cure his imaginative bent, it did no good.

At the age of 12 he was given a printing press, and he started his own newsletter, eventually branching into a stamp collecting business. Sometime in his late teens, he discovered the theater. From this point forward, publishing and the theater became lifelong obsessions.

Yet Baum's first solo foray into theatrical production, The Maid of Arran, was only a modest success, and he moved with his wife to South Dakota, where a drought was in full swing.

There, he ran a store, Baum's Bazaar, but extended too much credit and bankrupted it. From here, he turned to editing a local newspaper. This newspaper failed by 1891, and Frank Baum moved his family to Chicago, where he found work as a reporter, editor for a small paper focused on advertising displays, and even traveling sales.

At last, in 1897, L. Frank Baum found his true niche. He published a children's book named Mother Goose in Prose, illustrated by famed artist Maxfield Parrish.

Only two years after this, Baum took yet another gamble and self-published another children's book, Father Goose, His Book, illustrated by W. W. Denton.

To the surprise of publishers who had turned him down, it became the bestselling children's book of that year, and Baum finally had his break.

He took full advantage of his new fame to write the book he'd been wanting to write for years, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the beggining of an American Fairy Tale.

Baum drew from his lifetime experiences: the dry, gray terrain of drought-stricken South Dakota became Kansas, his traveling sales experience came in handy for the Wizard of Oz, and he borrowed the name of his niece, Dorothy Gage, who died as an infant. Part of the character for Dorothy came from Baum's mother in law, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, who was a well-known feminist.

The book was a brilliant success, the bestselling children's book for both 1900 and 1901, and Baum was able to return with the story to his original love, the theater.

The book was transformed into The Wizard of Oz, a Broadway musical, which ran with some changes for a decade on and off Broadway.

Though Baum wrote thirteen other Oz books, such as the Road to Oz, as well as the still-in-print The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and many other books, he never quite reached the same success as his original Wizard of Oz.

Perhaps this is because there was something uniquely magical about Oz, a true fairyland created American-style, with an American girl as protagonist and woven through with American sensibilities.

It may also have been due to the unique genius achieved by the Baum-Denslow partnership; no other artist ever contributed quite as much to the world of Oz as its first one.