About

Lyman Frank Baum (15 May 1856 – 6 May 1919) was an American author best known for his children’s fantasy books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first of a series. Besides the fourteen Oz books, he wrote 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems and at least 42 scripts.

Born and raised in Chittenango, New York, Baum moved west after an unsuccessful stint as a theatre producer and playwright. He and his wife opened a store in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he edited and published a newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. They then moved to Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and published children’s literature, bringing out the first Oz book in 1900.

He made many attempts to bring his work to the stage and screen; among his last projects was a film studio in Los Angeles. His books anticipated things later taken for granted: television, augmented reality and laptop computers in The Master Key, wireless telephones in Tik-Tok of Oz. The 1939 film of the first Oz book became a landmark of twentieth-century cinema.

Sources

Biography and book descriptions are adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. Portrait and covers are public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons. Sample chapters, and the two posts, which are Baum’s own introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and his note to Ozma of Oz, are public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg.