L. Frank Baum

Baum's childhood and early life

Frank was natural inside Chittenango, New York, into a personal of German origin, the seventh of nine kids born to Cynthia Stanton & Benjamin Ward Baum, only 5 of whom survived into adulthood. He was known as "Lyman" when his father's brother, however universally disliked this title, & favorite to last by "Frank". Benjamin Baum was the loaded man of affairs, world health organization got manufactured his fortune in the oil fields of Pennsylvania. Frank grew au fait his parents' expansive estate, Rose Lawn, which he universally remembered lovingly as a kind of paradise. As a immature toddler Frank was tutored home by using his sib, however at a age of Twelve he was sent to learn at Peekskill Military Academy. Frank was the sickly kid given to daydreaming, & his parents might keep close at hand thought he required toughening higher. However when deuce dead miserable years at a armed forces academy, charted an incident described as a heart attack, he was allowed to go to at home.

Frank began writing at an early age, peradventure due to an early fascination by having printing. His father bought him the inexpensive printing press, and Frank utilized it to develop A Rose Lawn At home Journal using a aid of his immature brother, Harry Clay Baum, using whom he got universally been close. A brothers published many issues of the journal & were potentially suspire to sell ads. Per period he was Xvii, Baum got established another amateur journal, A Philatelist, printed an 11-home pamphlet known as ''Baum's Complete Stamp Dealers' Directory'', & began the stamp franchise sustaining his friends.

At just about a equivalent instance Frank embarked upon his life infatuation by having theater and the performing arts, a devotion which would repeatedly lead him to failure & touching-bankruptcy. His number 1 such failure occurred at age Xviii, once a local theatrical company duped him into replenishing their option of costumes, by using the promise of leading roles that never come his way. Enlightened, Baum left a theatre—temporarily—and went to act as a clerk witharound his brother-in-law's dry goods company inside Syracuse.

At a age of Xx, Baum took in a recently vocation: the breeding of fancy poultry, which was a national craze at a period. He specialized inside raising a particular breed of fowl, the Hamburg chicken. Around 1880 he established the every month trade journal, A Poultry Record, & inside 1886, after Baum was 30 years old, his number one book was published: a Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Union, Rearing, & Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.

However Baum may never avoid a stage hanker. He continued to require roles around plays, performing under a stage title of Louis F. Baum. Inside 1880 his father manufactured him manager of the string of theaters that he owned, & Baum placed all about writing plays & gathering the company to work around the babies. A Maid of Arran, the melodramthe according to a popular novel, proved a great profits. Baum non single wrote a play however composed songs for it, & acted in the leading role.

In November 9, 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a illustrious women's suffrage activist.

The South Dakota years
Around July 1888 Baum and his married woman moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he opened a store, "Baum's Bazaar". His habit of rendering out wares in credit led to the eventual bankrupting of the store, and so Baum turned to editing the local newspaper, A Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, in which he wrote the illustrious column, "Our Landlady". Baum's description of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is based on his lives inside drought-ridden South Dakota.

Baum becomes an author

When Baum's newspaper failing around 1891, he and his personal moved to Chicago, Illinois, where Baum took a job reportage for the Evening Post, besides as a job selling china door-to-door. Around 1897 he wrote and published Mother Goose in Prose a collection of Mother Goose rhymes written as prose stories, & illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. Mother Goose was the moderate profits, & allowed Baum to quit his door-to-door job.

Inside 1899 Baum partnered with illustrator W. W. Denslow, to publish Father Goose: His Book, a collection of nonsense poetry. a book was a profits, becoming the better marketing toddlers's book of the season.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Around 1901, Baum and Denslow (by having whom he shared a right of first publication) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical & fiscal acclamation. A book was a bestselling tykes's book for deuce years when its initial publication. Baum went in to write xiii more novels according to a web pages & population of the Land of Oz.

2 years when Wizardly's publication, Baum & Denslow team sustaining composer Paul Tietjens and director Julian Mitchell to produce the musical stage version of the book. It ran in Broadway 293 stage nights from 1902 to 1911, and besides with success toured a United States. A stage version starred Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone as the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow respectively, which shot a pair to instant fame at the period. A stage version differed quite bit from either a book, & was aimed primarily at adults. Toto wwhen replaced sustaining Imogene the Cow, & Tryxie Tryfle, the waitress & Pastoria, a trolley car operator were added as fellow cyclone hikers.

Later life and work
By having a profits of Wizard, Baum & Denslow hoped lightning would strike the third instance & inside 1901 published Dot and Tot of Merryland. A book was one of Baum's weakest, & its failure farther strained his faltering relationship by having Denslow. It would exist as their go collaboration.

Many days when you took a development of the Oz series, Baum declared that he got written his go Oz book & devoted himself to more works of fantasy fiction depending within more sorcerous lands, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Queen Zixi of Ix. Even so, persuaded by popular require, letters from either kids, & a failure of his fresh books, he returned to the series both period. Completely of his novels develop fallen into public domain in most jurisdictions, and several come available across Project Gutenberg.

Late within life Baum was plagued using debt & malady. Because of his womb-to-tomb love of theatre, he typically financed elaborate musical comedy, typically to his fiscal hurt. One of Baum's worst fiscal endevors was his Fairylogues and Radio Plays (1908), which combined the slideshow, film, & survive actors by having the lecture by Baum when in case he were yielding a travelogue to Oz. All a same, Baum ran into pain & may non pay his debts to the company world health organization produced the films, & did not acquire back to the stable fiscal situation until nigh a decade late, fallowing he sold the royalty rights to numbers of of earliest works, including A Wonderful Wizard of Oz. His final book, Glinda of Oz was published a year after his dying around 1920 but the Oz series was continued yearn fallowing his dying by more authors, notably Ruth Plumly Thompson who wrote an additional xix Oz books. Baum manufactured utilize of many pseudonyms for some of his more, non-Oz books. It include: Edith Van Dyne (a ''Aunt Jane's Nieces series) Laura Bancroft (Twinkle & Chubbins, Officer Bluejay) Floyd Akers (a Sam Steele series) Suzanne Metcalf (Annabel) Schuyler Staunton (Girl of Destiny) John Estes Cooke Capt. Hugh Fitzgerald

Baum too anonymously wrote The Previous Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile''.

Baum died in May 6, 1919 and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.

Baum's beliefs
Politics
When you took a cases initiate to a Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum wrote a racist editorial for the Saturday Pioneer stating that the Native Americans (whom he described as "whining curs") should become entirely annihilated. When the Carnage (in the period of which, based on data from official numbers, 153 Indians away from a village of 350—including 230 women & children—were directly flushed, sustaining an unknown total of others afterwards anxious following of their forced displacement) he wrote another newspaper column repeating his earliest opinion & criticizing the government for not ingesting potentially coarse measures: "wipe these... untamable creatures from the face of the earth". It should exist as noted that these column come a sole knhave occasiin on which Baum expressed such views, & that he wrote the children after his own fortunes were declining. Occasionally of Baum's operate as a youngsters's creator, including 2 of his Oz books, keep around been criticized for perpetuating racist stereotypes just about African Americans.

A most common misconception is that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a parable on populism in the sense of bimetallism. Nothing inside Baum's life story or even style supports this notion, though there are a select few suggestive parallels between a book & certain historic numbers.

Religious beliefs
Originally an Episcopalian, Baum and his married woman became theosophists, in 1897. Baum's beliefs come typically reflected inside his writing. the single mention of a church in the Oz books is the porcelain one which Dorothy knocks over in the China United states in The Wizard of Oz. A Baums too sent their older sons to "Ethical Culture Sunday School" inside Chicago, which taught morality but not religion.

Miscellaneous anecdotes
When a wardrobe department of MGM began to buy costumes for the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz, they purchased 2nd hand material from either rummage sales about Hollywood. Actor Frank Morgan who played the Wizard, lean a single such 2nd-h& overcoat to have on, and he happened to notice that the lining of the coat got a label locution, "Property of L. Frank Baum". Within early publicity for the picture, MGM emphasized that this was the avowedly story. Before long when a film was freed, a coat was taken to Baum's married woman, world health organization confirmed that it experienced been his.[http://www.snopes.com/movies/films/ozcoat.htm] A title Oz for the traveler destination was inspired per labels on the creator's file: The-North, O-Z (transmitted in BBC Radio Four around 2003). John Ritter portayed Baum in the 1990 made for TV movie, The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story. A film was largely fiction, however locate a few of the basic details of Baum's life like his a several failures of his grown life prior to Oz & two or three of a elements that inspired the books.

Bibliography
For Oz books, please understand: List of Oz books Non-Oz works
The Maid of Arran (play,1882) The Book of Hamburgs (poultry guide, 1896) ''By the Candelabra's Glare (poetry, 1897) Mother Goose in Prose (prose retellings of Mother Goose rhymes, (1897) Father Goose: His Book (nonsense poetry, 1899) The Army Alphabet (1900) The Navy Alphabet (1900) Songs of Father Goose (Father Goose, set to music, 1900) The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (Trade publication, 1900) Dot and Tot of Merryland (fantasy, 1901) American Fairy Tales (fantasy, 1901) The Master Key: An Electric Fairy Tale (fantasy, 1901) The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) The Magical Monarch of Mo (fantasy, 1903) (Originally published in 1900 as A Just released Wonderland) The Enchanted Island of Yew (fantasy, 1903) Queen Zixi of Ix (fantasy, 1905) John Dough and the Cherub (fantasy, 1906) The Sea Fairies (fantasy, 1911) Sky Island (fantasy, 1912)

Under pseudonyms
Aunt Jane's Nieces (1906) Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad (1906) Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville (1908) Aunt Jane's Nieces at Operate (1906) Aunt Jane's Nieces inside Society (1910) Aunt Jane's Nieces & Uncle John (1911) The Flying Girl (1911) Aunt Jane's Nieces in Vacation (1912) A Flying Girl & Her Chum (1912) Aunt Jane's Nieces on the Cattle ranch (1913) Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West (1914) Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross (1915, republished in 1918) Mary Louise (1916) Mary Louise in the United states (1916) Mary Louise Solves the Mystery (1916) Mary Louise & a Liberty Girls (1918) Mary Louise Adopts the Soldier (1919)

A Twinkle Tales (1906) Officer Bluejay (1907)

The Survive Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile'' (1908)