L. Frank Baum

American · 1856 to 1919

Born Lyman Frank Baum on 15 May 1856 in Chittenango, New York, the seventh of nine children of Benjamin Ward Baum, a barrel-maker turned Pennsylvania oilman, and Cynthia Stanton Baum, he grew up on a country estate called Rose Lawn and disliked his given name so much that he went by Frank his whole life. A sickly, dreamy child, tutored at home, he was sent at twelve to Peekskill Military Academy, where corporal punishment for daydreaming brought on what may have been a psychogenic heart attack; he was withdrawn within two years. He raised Hamburg chickens, founded a poultry trade journal, ran a theatre his father built him in Richburg until it burned down, opened a failing Aberdeen, South Dakota, store called Baum's Bazaar, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (in whose pages he published two notorious editorials calling for the extermination of America's native peoples after Wounded Knee, columns his descendants have apologised for), and moved to Chicago after the paper failed. There, after Father Goose, His Book (1899) became the year's best-selling children's book, he and his illustrator W. W. Denslow published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Thirteen further Oz novels followed alongside forty-one other books, eighty-three short stories, and at least forty-two scripts. His 1902 musical adaptation ran on Broadway for 293 performances. He founded the short-lived Oz Film Manufacturing Company in Los Angeles and went broke twice. The 1939 MGM adaptation of his first Oz book would become a fixture of twentieth-century cinema. He died on 6 May 1919 at Ozcot, his Hollywood home, of a stroke nine days short of his sixty-third birthday; his last words were reportedly 'Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.'