Because of the success of the play and subsequent Oscar-winning movie, the book has often been published without “wonderful” in the title. The plot was decidedly different from the book, with Toto being replaced by a cow and more people from Kansas traveling to Oz along with Dorothy. In 1902, Baum collaborated on a stage version called The Wizard of Oz that ran on Broadway for two years and toured until 1911. WICKED WAS NOT THE FIRST OZ ADAPTATION ON BROADWAY. Baum got the name for his fairy country off a drawer on a file cabinet that was marked “O-Z.” He named his plucky heroine Dorothy Gale after an infant niece named Dorothy Louise Gage who died while he was writing the book.
THE LAND OF OZ WAS NAMED FOR A FILING CABINET.īaum’s original title for the book was “The Emerald City,” but publishers had a superstition that a jewel in a book title was bad luck and asked Baum to change it. But Baum did create the Land of Oz as a distinctly American utopia, making it the first truly American fairytale. Although there have been many theories on how the book is an allusion to the politics of the United States in the late 1800s, there is no conclusive proof that Baum intended any such connections. In 1900, Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with illustrations by William Wallace Denslow. HE STARTED WRITING CHILDREN'S BOOKS IN HIS FORTIES. (In 2006, two of Baum’s descendants apologized to the Sioux Nation for the editorials.) In 1891, Baum lost the newspaper and he and his family moved to Chicago. In his newspaper, he strongly supported women’s suffrage, but he is also thought to have written two racist editorials calling for extermination of Native Americans. He opened a store (which failed) and a newspaper (which failed, too). MOST OF HIS CAREER PATHS, INCLUDING RUNNING A NEWSPAPER, FAILED.Īfter several financial reverses-Baum failed as an actor, as a salesman, and in other careers-he moved his family in 1888 to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, in what is now South Dakota. Matilda Gage was the person who convinced Baum to write for children, having listened to him tell his children the stories that he created. Rogers, Baum was "a secure man who did not worry about asserting his masculine authority." In fact, most of his books had girls as the heroes. He had a warm relationship with his mother-in-law, who, along with his new wife, helped him become a lifelong suffragist and feminist. In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, daughter of the noted feminist and suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage.
An alternative hypothesis is that when he was living in Syracuse, a plank road was installed made out of a yellow colored wood. And for a young teen who just wanted to go home, the memory might have provided future inspiration. But it is also where he may have first seen a yellow brick road-at that time many of the streets of Peekskill were paved with yellow Dutch bricks. When he was 12, Baum was sent to the Peekskill Military Academy in Peekskill, New York, for two years, where he was absolutely miserable. DOROTHY'S "YELLOW BRICK ROAD" MIGHT HAVE BEEN BASED ON A CHILDHOOD MEMORY. Later, when Baum was 30, the magazine (supposedly without Baum's knowledge) published that original article in full, making it Baum's first published book. He stayed on as a column writer, and contributed a long, serialized article on breeding and rearing Hamburgs. At 23, he started his own chicken trade journal, which he soon sold to a rival. Another hobby was raising fancy chickens called Hamburgs. THE FIRST ANIMALS HE WROTE ABOUT WERE CHICKENS.īaum was a sickly child and his father indulged his hobbies, including buying him a small printing press that he used to produce a newspaper. In honor of Baum, Chittenango holds an annual festival of all things Oz called Oz-Stavaganza. Lyman Frank Baum was born on in Chittenango, New York, to a wealthy family and raised on an estate called Rose Lawn in Mattydale, New York, just outside Syracuse. HIS HOMETOWN HOSTS AN OZ-FEST (BUT NOT THAT OZZFEST). In honor of his 162nd birthday, here are 15 facts about the actual man behind the curtain. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a book that has never been out of print and that has been produced as movies, theatrical plays and musicals, and led to further cultural phenomena like The Wiz and Wicked.
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