May 6, 1919—L. Frank Baum, 63, who failed at multiple careers before creating The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and more than a dozen sequels, died following a stroke in Hollywood, Calif.—a community that, two decades later, would introduce his work to a whole new generation of fans with a musical adaptation of his fantasy starring Judy Garland.
Over the last century, Baum’s creation has expanded beyond even the veritable cottage industry he managed to maintain in his last two decades. Millions of movie fans, TV viewers and playgoers learned the story of Dorothy and her companions and what they encountered on the way to Oz in a host of different takes on that material—not just the Garland classic, but also Return to Oz, the African American-cast stage and screen musical The Wiz, the 1960 Shirley Temple TV adaptation of Land of Oz, as well as Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked and its current long-running Broadway musical adaptation.
It’s also a safe bet that only a fraction of the audiences for these works knows much, if anything, about the man at the center of all this.
Baum would have felt delighted to be recalled in any way at all. Yesterday, I posted about the quintessential “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci. Baum tried his hand at a number of pursuits, too— actor, playwright, salesman, chicken farmer, lecturer, department store window-dresser, journalist, and movie mogul. Yet, to one degree or another, he failed at all of these.
At the urging of his wife, Baum began writing children’s books in 1897. Though these were popular enough to induce his publisher to request more, the success he enjoyed with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was of an entirely different magnitude.
Not only has that title been in print continuously since then, but Baum followed it up with 13 sequels (with, after his death, another 19 by Ruth Plumly Thompson, and seven more by other authors, producing a grand total of 40 Oz books) along with a 2002 stage adaptation.
Oh, about that play: Even though it replaced little Toto with a cow, it ran on Broadway for two years and remained on tour until 1911. It was successful enough for Baum to try his hand on the stage again in 1908, this time with “The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays” combining a lecture by him with live actors, a movie, and projected slides.
It sounds not just innovative but even avant-garde, since neither radio nor film had advanced far as vehicles for narrative art yet. In a way, it was the same type of technical breakthrough that the movie musical represented three decades later. And, like that classic, it was also a bit ahead of its time.
Because its costs exceeded its revenues, Baum went financially aground again. This time, however, his bankruptcy had to hurt more than before, because he was now forced to give up his rights to the early books that had secured the series’ reputation.
Still, Baum being Baum, he didn’t let this latest failure keep him down for long, even starting The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914. The venture only lasted a few years, but it can be accounted a mild success, with its several Oz productions keeping the brand name before the public and Baum himself not losing his shirt this time.
I’ve written that Baum created a virtual cottage industry surrounding Oz, and a cottage industry has also developed surrounding the writer’s sources of inspiration. Some have speculated that it’s a veiled political commentary on the politics of gold and silver in the McKinley Presidency; others cite the peculiar politics of Chicago at the time; still others have looked to contemporary accounts of cyclones in Kansas, and where a yellow brick road might have impressed itself on Baum’s imagination (one possible source: 19th-century West Point), in tracing the germination of this tale that transports readers far beyond their everyday lives.
If you’re like me, your interest in Oz stems from the 1939 film, which was as notable for its visual splendor as for its musical brilliance. I pursued my interest in it--including a spectacular appearance by Judy Garland and MGM co-star Mickey Rooney promoting its New York premiere-- in this prior post.
But there have been authors whose interest in the book derived from the books first, notably Martin Gardner, Ray Bradbury, and Gore Vidal. When I first read the latter’s essay on the Oz books nearly 40 years ago as part of his collection The Second American Revolution and Other Essays 1976-1982, I did not wonder why he wrote about it. (Indeed, the editors of The New York Review of Books rightly considered this was within his bailiwick, given his elegant style and his past screenwriting activity).
At the same time, I did question why the frequently waspish novelist wrote at such length on the subject, given what I felt to be the series’ relative lack of literary merit or importance. But, at least on the second count, I think now that I was mistaken.
Like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling, and George R.R. Martin, Baum constructed an alternate universe, a fantasy world filled with its own characters and even geography. Countless fantasy readers over the years have found something in those worlds that allow them an escape from their own lives, and even a way of reimagining them.
Vidal claimed that, in defying expectations of traditional gender roles, Baum implicitly taught readers how to be "tolerant, alert to wonders." Although such a perspective appealed to gays such as Vidal and young girls pining for strong heroines, Baum’s sympathy for the marginalized only extended so far. In the 1890s, a newspaper he edited ran two editorials (allegedly written by Baum) calling for extermination of Native Americans. (A century later, two of his descendants apologized to the Sioux Nation.)
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