L. FRANK BAUM

May 15, 1856 - May 6, 1919

"I believe that dreams--daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing--are likely to lead to the betterment of the world."

~ Born with a congenitally weak heart, Frank had to avoid any kind of strenuous exercise.

~ This separated him from his seven brothers and sisters. He kept to himself and made up imaginary places and playmates.

~ When Frank was five, his father  struck it rich in the oil business. The family moved to Rose Lawn Estate, a country home near Chittenango.

~ Frank read fairy tales and British writers voraciously, and he especially enjoyed Dickens. But even at his young age, he criticized the fairy tales that were frightening and horrifying. He made the decision to one day write a different kind of fairy tale.

~ As a teenager he started up several newspapers and a magazine. In his late teens he became interested in the theater, and his father gave him several theaters and operas in New York and Pennsylvania to manage.

~ While Frank was home on holiday, he met Maud Gage. Maud came from a prosperous family from Fayetteville, NY.

~ Frank began courting Maud soon after meeting her. Maud’s mother was not thrilled by this. To her, he seemed flighty, a dreamer type and an unstable match for her daughter. They married anyway.

~ They moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where Frank operated a store, "Baum's Bazaar." It fell victim to hard times in 1890, so he ran the local newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer.

~ Throughout his life, Frank loved children and they adored him. Wherever he went, they would stop him and demand a story.

~ When the newspaper fell, Frank and family moved to Chicago where he took a job as a reporter for the Evening Post. To make ends meet he also worked as a traveling salesman for a china company. While on these trips, he developed characters and outlines for the stories he'd tell his children when back at home.

~ Teamed with illustrator Maxfield Parrish, Frank finally published his first children's book, Mother Goose in Prose in 1897.

~ Modestly successful, it allowed him to end his traveling job, which was difficult for his health.

~ Through his friend Opie Read, he met illustrator William Denslow in 1899. Their first official venture together was Father Goose, His Book. It become the best-selling children's book of the year.

~ The Baum-Denslow team began a second project. Frank wrote out the story longhand and gave it the title, The Emerald City. His publisher, however, held a superstitious notion against a book with a jewel in its title. They refused to publish it. Frank finally came up with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

~ Having produced the nation's best-selling children's book for two years running, Frank's reputation as a writer was firmly established.

~ Over the next 19 years he produced 62 books, most of them for children.

~ Under the pen name "Edith Van Dyne" he published 24 books for girls, and as "Floyd Akers" he wrote six books for boys.

~ Frank died of a stroke in his Hollywood house, Ozcot, at the age of 63.

~ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been filmed many times. The most famous was the 1939 version starring a sixteen-year-old Judy Garland. It was nominated for an Academy Award and selected to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.