Biography of L. Frank Baum
Lyman Frank Baum was born May 15, 1956 in Chittenango, New York. As one of nine children (four of which died before the age of two) he was home schooled, like his siblings, until the age of twelve. He spent much of his childhood on the grounds of Rose Lawn, a house that was built for his mother, Cynthia Stanton Baum out of his father’s oil fortune. As a child he was considered to be “weak at heart” his illness was either congenital or from an early episode with rheumatic fever. As a result, he was encouraged in his reading and daydreaming. When he was twelve, it was decided that he was well enough to attend Peekskill Military Academy, and all accounts are that he thoroughly hated it. He did not stay long however, for after two years of the rigid discipline there, he suffered a heart attack and was sent home to be tutored at home. One day, at age fourteen, he accompanied his father to work and while waiting in a printing office made up his mind to be a printer or a journalist. His father bought him a printing press and he and his bother went into business of “job printing” and the publication of the amateur paper, The Rose Lawn Home Journal. Thus began Baum’s life-long career as a journalist, even though it is his Oz series that is remembered most.
In fact, Baum’s careers varied considerably throughout his lifetime, and he was a success in almost all that he did. He soon developed a passion for the theater, and his father, sensing this passion, made him manager of a string of theater and opera houses that he owned in New York and Pennsylvania. His first major literary work was the script, music, and lyrics for a play called The Maid of Arran (1882), in which he was the leading man.The play was an instant success. Through his sister Harriet, Baum met his future wife while on holiday at home. Maud Gage was the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a prominent feminist and leader in the campaign for women’s suffrage. Mrs. Gage had serious expressed doubts about Maud dropping out of college and marring an actor who was always on tour and whose only real accomplishment was a “trifling melodrama.” Still, with the eventual consent of her family, they were married in the Gage family home on November 9, 1882. They traveled together while Baum was still on tour until Gage had her first baby, Frank Joslyn Baum (Frank Jr.), in 1883, and they settled in Syracuse. The couple eventually had four boys, Frank Jr., Robert (1886), Harry, and Kenneth.
Although the Baum’s was a happy marriage, their life was not free from trouble. After his father’s death in 1887, through a series of unfortunate mismanagements and scandal, the family companies went bankrupt and the family fortune went with them. In search of economic security Baum moved his family to the Dakota Territory, specifically Amberdeen, where he opened a store called “Baum’s Bazar” that sold all kinds of wares including everything from tableware and household items to toys and candy. It was here that Baum developed a habit of telling stories to the children who frequented the store. Eventually the store when under, and he became manager of the weekly paper, The Amberdeen Saturday Pioneer, but he continued to tell stories to children on his way home. Even after moving again to Chicago in 1893, and seeking various employment at newspapers, magazines, and as a traveling salesman, he never gave up telling stories to the families of the neighborhood. It was his mother-in-law who suggested writing them down for publication. He would write Mother Goose in Prose (1897), Father Goose, His Book (1899), and Songs of Father Goose (1900) all before producing his most famous work The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The story goes that he interrupted a storytelling session in order to write the story of Dorothy and her friends while it was still fresh in his mind. He wrote seventeen sequels to the Wizard because of its popularity. Children would send him letters constantly to beg him to write more of these tales.
During all of this, Baum suffered from numerous health problems. He suffered from nausea, dizzy-spells, chest pains, attacks of angina pectoris, and gall bladder problems during his lifetime. Also, his life-long vise of smoking cigars could not have helped. In 1908, accruing much debt from Baum’s failed venture “Fairylogue and Radio Plays,” Maud and Frank moved to a home they called Ozcot in southern California with their dog Toto. It was hoped that the California sunshine would improve Baum’s failing health. There Baum continued to write, but took up gardening, and he became an award-winning horticulturalist. In constant pain and finally bedridden, he continued to write until the end. On May 16, 1919, after slipping in and out of a coma he uttered his last words, “Now we can cross the shifting sands," to his wife. The last of the Oz books, Glinda of Oz was published posthumously in 1920. Some would say that Baum's imagination and sense of adventure from an early age is what led him to write the first American Fairy Tale, and this would have pleased him for this was his greatest goal. Perhaps his enduring legacy can be found in the way he describes the fairyteller’s responsibility:
“Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things has (sic.) to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams—day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing—are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.”
Rogers, Katharine M. L. Frank Baum: The Creator of Oz. St. Martin’s Press. New York, N.Y.: 2002.
Hearn, Michael Patrick. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., New York, N.Y.: 1973.
Carpenter, Angelica Shirley and Shirley, Jean. L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz. Lerner Publications Co., Minneapolis: 1992.
Historical Children's Literature
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign