L. Frank Baum

I greatly enjoyed learning about L. Frank Baum. He seems a very kind, jovial man who loved his family and life in general. I hope you'll enjoy hearing about him as mech as I did.

     Early Life

Lyman Frank Baum was born May 15, 1856 to a wealthy family in Chittenago, New York. He grew up a bit pampered, having English tutors brought in for his education and receiving every luxury. One thing Baum loved above all else was reading. He would inhale anything from Dickens to Shakespeare. 

Baum married Maud Gage when he was 26 and began his favourite part of life: family life. Baum adored his children and would spend hours with them. They were his greatest sounding-board for stories. Through his children, he found out what elements were good, what weren't. This would lead him to success.

     Writing Career

Baum's first taste of writing began when his father gave him his own printing press for his fourteenth birthday. Baum was ecstatic to begin his own family newspaper. 

From the very beginning, writing was always a side job. Baum was never the successful businessman. He want through several jobs such as raising chickens, running a game store, as well an extensive dream in theatre. He still loved to write, so he would write the occasional newspaper article as well a column on being a husband, co-written with his wife. Eventually he became the editor of an unsuccessful newspaper the Aberdeen Sunday Pioneer. This gave him the chance to write whatever he wished, but after three years he had little to show for it financially. He had to move on.

Over the years, Baum published a couple books such as The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors. Needless to say, they didn't sell well. It wasn't until later in life that his mother-in-law encouraged him to write down the stories he told his children. That is how the road to Oz began.

     The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

For a while, Baum was thinking of his greatest story yet. Various elements of his life wormed their way into his story of a girl named Dorothy. At this time he lived in Chicago and marvelled at their White City, a section of the waterfront built for the 1893 World's Fair. Baum and his family visited it several times, and it inspired his Emerald City. The strong female characters in Oz were inspired by his wife. As the daughter of a leading suffragette, Maud gave Baum little choice but to believe in equal rights for women. The name for Oz was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing. As he was telling one of his adventures, a little girl asked where all these fabulous creatures lived. Hurriedly looking around, Baum spotted a filing cabinet with drawers labelled A-N and O-Z. "Why, Oz of course!" was his reply.

When The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, Baum had finally found the career that would provide for him until the end of his days. Living with his ever-patient wife, he lived out the rest of his life in a large home in California, happy to tell stories to all children who would come.

The man who created the world of Oz was as fun and fanciful as his country. After his death on May 6, 1919, his dream to stimulate the imagination of children."The imaginative child," he wrote, "will become the imaginative man or women most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization."

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Frank_Baum

Krull, Kathleen. The Road to Oz: Twists, Turns, Bumps, and Triumphs in the Life of L. Frank Baum. Borzoi Books: New York, 2008