L. Frank Baum may have been born in upstate New York, but his most enduring and memorable book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was written right here in Chicago.
Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, New York. As a young man he received his first taste of publishing when his father bought him a printing press. Together with his brother, Henry, Frank began his own local newspaper, The Rose Lawn Home Journal, and several magazines. Frank, who was born Lyman Frank Baum but always went by Frank, also loved the theatre and dabbled in acting. His father owned several theaters in New York and Pennsylvania, and Baum took advantage of the opportunity to begin writing plays.
Baum's first major work was The Maid of Arran, a play based on the novel A Princess of Thule by Scottish writer William Black. The play was a success, and Frank and the acting troupe formed a touring company to take the performance on the road.
In 1882, Baum married Maude Gage, and the two of them lived for a while like nomads -- first with the Maid of Arran touring company, then later settling out west in the Dakota Territory in 1888. There, Frank briefly operated a general store. When the store went bankrupt in 1890, he took a position editing and publishing a local newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
When the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer also went bankrupt in 1891, Frank moved himself and his family, which now included four sons, to Chicago where he found work as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post. Baum first settled near Campbell Park and wrote short stories and prose when he wasn't at the Post.
Baum and his family then moved to a home at 1667 N. Humboldt Boulevard after the success of Father Goose, His Book, which Baum published in 1899 in collaboration with illustrator William W. Denslow.
Baum's best-known work, of course, is his seventh book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was published in 1900. The story goes that Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and the rest of the inhabitants of Oz were created when Baum began telling a story to some kids in his Humboldt Park neighborhood. In a fit of inspiration, he soon broke up the storytelling to hurriedly write the story down. The success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz allowed Baum to commit to writing full-time and led to over a dozen Oz sequels.
In 1910 Baum and his family left Chicago for California where they settled in an estate they dubbed Ozcot. In all, Baum wrote more than 60 books in his lifetime before dying just short of his 63rd birthday in 1919.
In Chicago, L. Frank Baum was commemorated in 1976 when a park on Lincoln Avenue, between Webster and Larabee, was named Oz Park in his honor. In 1995, a Tin Man sculpture created by local artist John Kearney was added to the park. The Tin Man sculpture, created entirely out of chrome car bumpers, is nine feet tall and weighs nearly a ton. In 2001, Kearney contributed to the park again with the addition of his bronze sculpture of the Cowardly Lion.
Bibliography and Additional Resources
Baum, Frank Joslyn and Russell P. MacFall. To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1961.
Carpenter, Angelica Shirley and Shirley Jean. L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz. Minneapolis, Minn.: Lerner Publications, 1991.
Holden, Greg. Literary Chicago: A Book Lover's Tour of the Windy City. Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2001.
Library of Congress. The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale. This exhibition from the Library of Congress was created for the 100th Anniversary of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. View letters, documents, original illustrations, and other artifacts from Oz and Baum's other works.
Project Gutenberg Titles by L. Frank Baum. Read more than 20 books by Baum now in the public domain, free online through Project Gutenberg.
Have a topic you would like to see in "Ask the Librarian"? Send your suggestions to librarian@gapersblock and it may be featured in a future column.
Ramsin / March 25, 2004 11:13 AM
I always thought that Tin-Man statue was weirdly posing like Mick Jagger.
Doesn't the Harold Washington special collections room have some of the originals of the Baum script, Alice? I thought I saw them in there, but it was a long time ago.
And what about the theory that the first Oz story was an allegory of the the silver v. gold controversy? It went something like this, if I remember:
Tin Man = Industry, Scarecrow = Farmers; "Emerald City" = Greed of D.C.; wicked witch of the east was East Coast banking interests; Dorothy wears "silver slippers" to take her to D.C., because the promise of silver standard mobilized people from the heart-land (e.g., Kansas); The cowardly lion = the masses; and someone, maybe the Wizard himself, represented William Jennings Bryan.