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Writer:

L. Frank Baum

  • Born: May 15, 1856
  • Died: May 06, 1919
  • Occupation: Writer, Director
  • Active: teens, '30s, '60s-'80s, 2000s
  • Major Genres: Children's/Family, Fantasy
  • Career Highlights: The Wizard of Oz, Return to Oz, The Wizard of Oz
  • First Major Screen Credit: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)

Biography

L. Frank Baum is one of the most fondly remembered of all children's book authors, for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the entire Land of Oz as depicted in a dozen subsequent books. He was also one of the most successful authors of children's books of his era, and among the very first in America to bring his own works to the screen; indeed, he worked as a screenwriter, director, and producer, and founded his own movie studio -- all activities growing directly out of the popularity of his early Oz books.

Born in Chittenango, NY, in 1856, Lyman Frank Baum was the son of Benjamin Ward Baum, a wealthy speculator in oil, and the former Cynthia Stanton. A sickly child with a congenitally weak constitution, he was educated at home, and whatever allure formal learning might have held was banished by a two-year stay at the Peekskill Military Academy that ended with him suffering a heart attack in 1870, at age 14. Baum spent his teens writing a family newspaper and journals on stamp collecting and the breeding of exotic chickens. He did some acting in New York in the 1880s and, with his family's backing, produced his own play, The Maid of Arran. He married Maud Gage in 1882 and they had four children. Perhaps in response to his marriage, he went into what seemed like a more practical business, making axle grease. Thus began a string of failures -- the axle grease company, a department store, and a newspaper all folded in succession. He did better as a traveling salesman and merchandise buyer for a retailer, and he also edited a successful trade magazine.

Baum became a children's book author by accident. His wife's mother asked him to write explanations of the nursery rhymes that he'd devised for his children. Those explanatory tales, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish and published in 1897 as Mother Goose in Prose, was a popular book and a success. He followed it two years later with Father Goose: His Book, with illustrations by W.W. Denslow. When the elaborately devised volume proved too daunting a risk for any publisher, the author and illustrator together paid for the printing and enjoyed a bestseller. In 1900, Baum and Denslow published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was so popular, that Baum was able to give up his other activities. Over the ensuing ten years, he wrote many dozens of further children's books, authored under a multitude of male and female pseudonyms, some of which sold very well, but it was the Oz books -- of which he'd initially only intended to write one -- that immortalized him.

Baum's original intent in writing the first Oz book was to create a new kind of fairy tale, American in origin and basis, and appealing to American children. He sought to reduce, if not eliminate, the influence of European folklore, and also to avoid the kind of moral lessons that weighted down the work of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Baum's stories teach self-reliance and optimism, as well as an attachment to home and family, without the grimly oppressive moral tone that one finds especially in Andersen's stories. No repentant ballerinas dance to heaven (and redemption) on the bloody stumps of their feet in Baum's books, as the heroine of Andersen's The Red Shoes does; rather, Baum's stories are fun to read and imagine, and, it was soon discovered, to see presented in theater (and, later, in film). Ironically, he was never in as good a financial condition as that string of successes would lead one to expect, because of various entertainment ventures that never earned a profit. But it was those losses and setbacks that made it necessary for Baum to continually expand and extend the world and stories of Oz.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was brought to the Broadway stage by Baum in a 293-performance run (a very respectable number in those days) that failed to make back its costs because of the expense of mounting it. Yet it was because of that theatrical production, and the popularity of a pair of comics -- David Montgomery and Fred Stone, as the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, who generated a groundswell of enthusiasm for more stories of the two characters -- that Baum was obliged to extend his Oz stories. The Land of Oz (1904) focused on the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, and also introduced a new character, Princess Ozma. It was a success as a book but a failure on-stage, and the losses incurred by the latter production forced Baum to extend his Oz stories still further. He published Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908), and The Road to Oz (1909). He was still insolvent, however, as a result of a failed entertainment extravaganza, Fairylogue and Radio Plays.

In 1910, seeking to reduce his living expenses, Baum moved his family west to the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood, thus becoming the first major American author to relocate to the film mecca -- though, of course, his move predated the film industry's move there. That same year, he wrote what he hoped would be the final Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz. His next two attempts at children's novels, The Sea Fairies (1911) and Sky Island (1912), were failures, however, and also coincided with Baum's declaration of bankruptcy. Finally, he succumbed to the inevitable. Unable to escape from the fantasy world he'd created, he declared himself the "Royal Historian of Oz" and wrote a further book about the magical land each year for the remainder of his life. Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) started the new series of books, which eventually included Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Rinkitink in Oz (1916), The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), and Glinda of Oz (1920). In the midst of this run, he also founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, which produced a handful of movies in 1914, all but one based on Baum's own Oz stories. None, not even His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, produced and directed personally by Baum, was especially successful, partly as a result of the expense involved in creating the fantasy world onscreen. The studio went bankrupt in 1915, but for a change, Baum had not invested in the company personally and had no major losses.

Baum's health failed following a gall bladder operation in 1918, and he was bedridden for much of the remainder of his life. He died in 1919 just a few days before his 63rd birthday. Baum's estate continued to extend the Oz franchise, however, designating Ruth Plumly Thompson as the author to carry on the series; she delivered 19 books, which today are almost as highly sought out by collectors as those of Baum. The legacy did suffer in the 1920s when director/producer Larry Semon secured the rights to make a new Oz movie. His 1925 film version of The Wizard of Oz was a badly thought out version of the story, notably for its slapstick humor and some racist jokes, and the presence of a young Oliver Hardy, who appears briefly as the Tin Woodman. The Oz books remained popular in reprints into the 1920s and '30s, though the latter lacked the handsome color plates that had highlighted earlier editions.

In the late '30s, MGM took on the making of a big-budget, Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz (1939), with songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, and starring Judy Garland (who was substituting for the studio's first choice, Shirley Temple, whom Fox would not loan out). The resulting movie was a dazzling creation, although, at the time, also a serious financial failure -- it was misunderstood as a children's film, at a time when children paid only ten cents to get into movies, and represented a loss on the studio's books for many years to come. (Oddly enough, Fox tried to create a similar vehicle for Temple in the form of The Blue Bird, in 1940.) It was a series of annual network television showings, beginning in the mid-'50s and running into the 1980s, that established the movie's reputation beyond the ranks of a relatively small cult of devotees. Those showings were intended for children, though in prime time -- with color broadcasts coming in early in the cycle -- and it was then that parents and grandparents discovered that they, too, could equally enjoy the film.

In the midst of that gradual rediscovery of The Wizard of Oz, Frank J. Baum, one of the author's sons, writing with Russell P. MacFall, published the definitive biography of his father, To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz (1961). Shirley Temple also belatedly got in on the act with the Shirley Temple Show's 1960 broadcast of "The Land of Oz" in which she played Ozma in a cast that included Jonathan Winters and Sterling Holloway. The movie's broadcasts became a generational ritual, like Thanksgiving Day dinner, within 20 years, and by the 1970s, The Wizard of Oz was earning the largely moribund MGM organization as much money each year as blockbusters like Gone With the Wind, An American in Paris, Ben-Hur, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It subsequently proved a gold mine many times over on videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD, especially after the MGM library was purchased by Ted Turner, whose business acumen brought every major movie ever made by the studio to wider audiences.

By the time The Wizard of Oz was reaching home video, the images and lines from the movie were part of general popular culture. The rock group the Electric Light Orchestra even used the image of the ruby slippers on the cover of its mid-'70s album Eldorado. Concurrent with, but separate from, the general public's gradual embrace of the movie, the gay community took The Wizard of Oz to heart as a symbol of its own; this grew out of the presence of Judy Garland in the film and its musical and fantasy virtues, as well as its being part of "old Hollywood." At the same time, there were also knowledgeable teachers and librarians in communities where gay rights and gay pride were never discussed who recommended the Baum books as just plain good children's literature. Baum's Oz novels (and the later Oz books by Thompson) were in print in mass-market and trade paperbacks during the 1970s and '80s -- even Del Rey Books (the Ballantine Books science fiction/fantasy line) had a series of them aimed at their audience. Thanks to the continued allure of the 1939 movie (and to a much lesser degree, the 1985 Return to Oz), Baum's popularity and recognition seem assured for many years to come. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

 
 
Biography: L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) wrote 69 books beloved by children, including "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", which became a classic movie.

Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, near Syracuse, New York. His father, Benjamin, was a wealthy oil businessman, and young Frank (who disliked his first name and never used it) grew up in comfort. Because he had a weak heart, Frank led a quiet life as a child and was educated largely by tutors. A brief stay at a military academy was not successful, and Frank returned home to indulge his taste for reading, writing, stamp collecting, and chicken breeding. He also published two different monthly newspapers during his teenage years.

Baum grew up to become a man of great charm and many interests, yet he had little direction. He pursued a variety of careers ranging from acting to newspaper reporting to theatrical management to writing plays. One of his plays, The Maid of Arran, was a surprise smash hit, and Frank and his company toured with it throughout the United States and Canada in the early 1880s.

While at home on a break from the tour, Baum met and became engaged to Maud Gage, youngest daughter of prominent women's suffrage activist Matilda J. Gage. The strong-willed Matilda did not approve of the impractical Baum, but Maud, equally determined, insisted, and the two were married in November 1882. The marriage, apparently one of opposites, was a happy one, as Maud provided Baum with the stability and good sense he needed, and eventually for their children the discipline he was too gentle to perform.

Baum gave up acting when Maud became pregnant with their first child and all the scenery, props, and costumes for The Maid of Arran were destroyed in a fire. He worked for a time in the family oil business in Syracuse, still writing plays in his spare time, none of which were produced. In the late 1880s he and the family, which now included two sons, moved to the Dakota Territory, where Baum worked for a time as a shopkeeper and then as a newspaper editor, enjoying both jobs but failing financially in each.

By 1891 it was clear that his growing family, now with four sons, required that he find a job that would provide financial stability. They moved to Chicago, where he was first a newspaper reporter but soon took a better paying job as a traveling salesman with a crockery firm. At the suggestion of his mother-in-law, Baum began to write down some of the stories he made up to tell his sons every evening when he was home. One of these stories, Mother Goose in Prose, was published in 1897. The book sold well, and, on the advice of his doctor, Baum gave up his traveling job. Instead, he became the editor of a journal for window-dressers, which also did well.

Baum next decided to collaborate on a children's book with a friend, the artist W. W. Denslow. Father Goose, His Book, published in 1899, was a best-seller. One of the five books he published in 1900, also based on stories he had told his sons and illustrated by Denslow, was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which immediately broke records for sales and made Baum a celebrity. At the suggestion of his publisher, Baum's book, with substantial changes to fit the theatrical tastes of the day, was made into a musical in 1902, which also was a great success and toured the United States for years. A second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, a clever satire on the women's suffrage movement, was published in 1904 and was very popular, and other Oz books followed, though none matched the originality or sales of the first two books. In addition, over the next two decades he wrote over 35 non-Oz books under various pseudonyms and aimed at various audiences. Most of these were "pot-boilers, " but they did well financially and helped make Baum a wealthy man.

Always looking for new outlets for his creativity, Baum became interested in films. In 1909 he founded a company to produce hand-colored slides featuring characters from his Oz books. These were shown while he narrated and an orchestra played background music. Although highly innovative, these "radio-plays, " as he called them, lost a great deal of money, and in June 1911 he was forced to declare bankruptcy. A later venture into the film business, the Oz Film Company in 1914, produced six movies but experienced severe distribution problems and also failed, though not as disastrously.

Using money Maud had inherited from her mother, the Baums moved to Hollywood, California, in 1910 for Frank's health, and there built Ozcot, a large home with an impressive garden. Here he produced additional Oz books, to a total of 14, which helped ease his financial problems. But with most of his fortune gone and his health failing, in his later years Baum lived quietly at Ozcot, gardening, writing stories, and answering the hundreds of letters he received from Oz-struck children. After a protracted illness in his gall-bladder and a 24 hour coma, he died on May 6, 1919, supposedly uttering, "Now we can cross the Shifting Sands" just a minute before expiring.

Baum's Oz books were so popular and profitable that after his death, with Maud's permission, the publishers continued the series using other writers. In addition, the lasting popularity of Oz was in no small way aided by film versions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the 1925 silent version with Oliver Hardy as the Tin-Man, and most notably the 1939 classic MGM musical with Judy Garland as Dorothy.

Although Baum's avowed intention was merely to entertain children with unique American creations and American values, his Oz books have been endlessly criticized and analyzed, and they sometimes have been banned from libraries as being too imaginative, too frightening, or even too dull. Nonetheless, they constitute 20th century America's first and most enduring contribution to children's fantasy literature.

Further Reading

Frank Joslyn Baum (Baum's oldest son) and Russell P. MacFall produced an affectionate biography based on personal reminiscences and a variety of family materials, To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz (1961). This remains the prime source of information on Baum. An excellent introduction to Baum and his works is contained in Daniel P. Mannix's "The Father of the Wizard of Oz" (American Heritage, December 1964). Angelica Shirley Carpenter and Jean Shirley's L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz (1991) is of particular interest because of its many relevant photographs and illustrations. Less valuable are Raylyn Moore's Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land (1974) and The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was, by Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye (1957). Michael Patrick Hearn, the editor of The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973), presents a fascinating biographical and critical introduction. The book also has an excellent bibliography. Hearn's 1983 The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum is the best collection of critical views on Baum and Oz; it contains essays by the professor Edward Wagenknecht, who in 1929 was one of the first to view Baum's work as an important contribution to American literature, and by James Thurber, whose 1934 essay reveals him to have been a big Oz fan. Aljean Harmetz's 1977 book The Making of the Wizard of Oz, focusing more on the production of the 1939 musical film, contains "Appendix B: About L. Frank Baum, " a detailed overview of the major events in Baum's life. See also Henry M. Littlefield, whose essay (reprinted from The American Culture, 1968) posited the theory of Oz as a populist fable; Fred Erisman (essay from American Quarterly, Fall 1968), who views the Oz books as Baum's reaction to the Progressive dilemma; and Osmond Beckwith (Children's Literature, 1976), who views Oz through Freudian eyes. Also helpful are Marius Bewley's Masks and Mirrors (1970), which contains a chapter on "The Land of Oz: America's Great Good Place, " and the chapter "L. Frank Baum and Oz" in Roger Sale's Fairy Tales and After (1978).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Lyman Frank Baum

(born May 15, 1856, Chittenango, N.Y., U.S. — died May 6, 1919, Hollywood, Calif.) U.S. writer of children's books. Baum achieved commercial success with his first book, Father Goose (1899), and followed it the next year with the even more popular Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wrote 13 more Oz books, which acquired a huge readership. The series was continued by Ruth Plumly Thompson after his death.

For more information on Lyman Frank Baum, visit Britannica.com.

 
Fairy Tale Companion: L. Frank Baum

Baum, L. Frank [Lyman Frank Baum] (1856–1919), American author of the Oz books and other fantasies for children. Born in Chittenango, New York, Baum enjoyed a sheltered and prolonged childhood on his family's country estate, Rose Lawn. Because of a heart defect, he was educated at home—except for a miserable two years at Peekskill Military Academy—and his father, a prosperous oil man and banker, willingly financed his hobbies. When Baum decided on a stage career, his father bought him an acting company, enabling him to play the lead in his own melodrama, The Maid of Arran (1882). After his father and older brother died, however, the family business collapsed, and Rose Lawn was sold. Baum and his wife—he had married Maud Gage, daughter of a famous woman suffragist—went west to Aberdeen, Kansas, investing first in a variety store, then in a newspaper, both of which soon failed. The family, now with four sons, moved to Chicago in 1891, where their fortunes gradually improved. Drawing on his knowledge of theatrical effects and his retail experience, Baum founded a successful journal for professional ‘window trimmers’. He also published his first children's book, Mother Goose in Prose (1897), a collection of stories based on Mother Goose rhymes, illustrated by the young Maxfield Parrish. With The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), colourfully illustrated by W. W. Denslow, Baum's reputation as a children's author was established, and his lifelong love of the theatre seemed vindicated when a musical adaptation of The Wizard became a smash hit in 1902. Throughout his life, however, he was to court financial disaster. While The Land of Oz (1904), was received with delight, the musical based on it was an expensive flop. He was forced not only to begin producing an annual Oz book, but to adopt various pseudonyms for such formulaic series as ‘Aunt Jane's Nieces’ and ‘The Boy Fortune Hunters’. In 1910 he and Maud moved to California, where they built a house in Hollywood called ‘Ozcot’. Inevitably, Baum became involved in silent films, forming the short‐lived Oz Film Manufacturing Company to produce his own stories. After his death, his publisher hired Ruth Plumly Thompson, who added another 19 Oz books to Baum's original 14 stories before she retired in 1939.

Baum is considered the pivotal figure in the history of American fantasy—the first author to create a sustained work of fantasy with a distinctively American character. A lover from childhood of fairy tales, he had studied both traditional and literary tales with something like a scholar's interest. He wrote a historical introduction on Mother Goose for his own Mother Goose in Prose, and his 1909 article ‘Modern Fairy Tales’ shows his broad acquaintance with contemporary authors such as Howard Pyle and E. Nesbit, as well as Andersen, Carroll, and Frank Stockton. His introduction to The Wizard of Oz reveals his awareness of attempting something new, claiming that ‘the old‐time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and bloodcurdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.’ The Wizard, he announced, would be ‘a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out’. In fact, Baum's indebtedness to his predecessors and his willingness to innovate are equally apparent. The Wizard follows the traditional pattern of the magical quest, in which a human protagonist is helped by talking animals or other supernatural creatures, and must defeat a monster in order to attain his goal. Yet the ‘modernized fairy tale’ begins not ‘once upon a time’ but in the drought‐stricken Midwest Baum had known first‐hand. Its protagonist is a self‐reliant American girl, her first companion a homely scarecrow, and the Wizard a conman from Omaha. Oz itself, despite its royal rulers, is essentially democratic; its inhabitants show no trace of class‐consciousness, while its economy—as described in the sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz (1910)—is that of a socialist utopia. His cast of characters features a high proportion of original creations—the Tin Woodman, the Patchwork Girl, the Wogglebug, and many more—yet the ‘stereotyped’ fairies, witches, and talking animals can be found in Oz as well. Baum's singular success in reconciling through fantasy the Old World and the New surely accounts for much of the Oz books' appeal.

While Baum is best known as the ‘Royal Historian of Oz’, several of his other experiments with the fairy tale are also worthy of note. Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), a full‐length story of a magic wishing cloak, proves his expertise with the more traditional fairy tale; critics consider it among his finest works. American Fairy Tales (1908) is an interesting (though only intermittently successful) attempt to adapt to an American setting the E. Nesbit type of fantasy, in which magical happenings erupt into the everyday world. Perhaps his boldest experiment, however, is The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), a unique amalgamation of myth, saint's legend, and fairy tale. In Baum's ‘explanation’ for the existence of Santa Claus, a human boy raised by nymphs in the mythical Forest of Burzee dedicates his life to giving children pleasure, invents the first toys, is attacked by the forces of evil and defended by the fairy immortals who have nurtured him, and finds himself finally endowed—on his deathbed—with immortality. That Baum identified with this protagonist is clear; he too had consciously dedicated himself to the happiness of children.

Bibliography

  • Harmetz, Aljean, The Making of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1977).
  • Hearn, Michael Patrick, The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973).
  • ——(ed.), The Wizard of Oz, Critical Heritage Series (1983).
  • International Wizard of Oz Club, The Baum Bugle: A Journal of Oz.

— Suzanne Rahn

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Baum, L. Frank
(Lyman Frank Baum) (bôm), 1856–1919, American journalist, playwright, and author of children's stories, b. Chittenango, N.Y. He and his family moved to South Dakota in 1888, where he ran a newspaper, and to Chicago in 1891, where he worked as a journalist. His first children's book, Mother Goose in Prose (1897), was followed by Father Goose: His Book (1899), which was an immediate bestseller. In 1900 he published his most famous work, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a story about a little girl carried by a tornado to the magical land of Oz. Baum's dramatization of the book was produced in 1902; the story was also made into an extraordinarily popular motion picture in 1938. Although he wrote more than 70 children's books, Baum's fame rests largely on The Wizard and his 13 other stories of Oz, including Ozma of Oz (1907) and The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), all of which emphasize such American virtues as practicality, self-reliance, tolerance, and egalitarianism.

Bibliography

See M. P. Hearn, ed., The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973); biography by K. M. Rogers (2002).

 
Works: Works by L. Frank Baum
(1856-1919)

1900The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum introduces his imaginary realm and his American heroine in the first book of a popular children's fantasy series, the first by an American. Baum would produce fourteen sequels, including The New Wizard of Oz (1903), Ozma of Oz (1907), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913). The Oz franchise was continued with Baum's permission by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who produced an annual Oz book until 1939. The books' illustrator, John R. Neill (1877-1943), added additional books in the series until his death. Baum was born in New York and worked as a poultry farmer, salesman, and newspaperman before establishing his career as a children's book writer with Father Goose (1899).

 
Quotes By: Lyman Frank Baum

Quotes:

"That proves you are unusual, returned the Scarecrow; and I am convinced the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed."

 
Wikipedia: L. Frank Baum
Lyman Frank Baum
L_frank_baum.jpg
L. Frank Baum circa 1901
Born May 15 1856(1856--)
Chittenango, New York
Died May 6 1919 (aged 62)
Hollywood, California
Occupation Author, Newspaper Editor, Actor, Screenwriter, Film Producer
Spouse Maud Gage
Children Frank Joslyn Baum
Robert Stanton Baum
Harry Neal Baum
Kenneth Gage Baum

Lyman Frank Baum (May 15 1856 – May 6 1919) was an American author, actor, and independent filmmaker best known as the creator, along with illustrator W. W. Denslow, of one of the most popular books in American children's literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, better known today as simply The Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a plethora of other works, and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen.

Baum's childhood and early life

Frank was born in Chittenango, New York, into a devout Methodist family of German (father's side) and Scots-Irish (mother's side) origin, the seventh of nine children born to Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Baum, only five of whom survived into adulthood. He was named "Lyman" after his father's brother, but always disliked this name, and preferred to go by "Frank". His mother, Cynthia Stanton, was a direct descendant of Thomas Stanton, one of the four Founders of what is now Stonington, Connecticut.

Benjamin Baum was a wealthy businessman, who had made his fortune in the oil fields of Pennsylvania. Frank grew up on his parents' expansive estate, Rose Lawn, which he always remembered fondly as a sort of paradise. As a young child Frank was tutored at home with his siblings, but at the age of 12 he was sent to study at Peekskill Military Academy. Frank was a sickly child given to daydreaming, and his parents may have thought he needed toughening up. But after two utterly miserable years at the military academy, he was allowed to return home. Frank Joslyn Baum claimed that this was following an incident described as a heart attack, though there is no contemporary evidence of this.

Frank started writing at an early age, perhaps due to an early fascination with printing. His father bought him a cheap printing press, and Frank used it to produce The Rose Lawn Home Journal with the help of his younger brother, Henry (Harry) Clay Baum, with whom he had always been close. The brothers published several issues of the journal and included advertisements they may have sold. By the time he was 17, Baum had established a second amateur journal, The Stamp Collector, printed an 11-page pamphlet called Baum's Complete Stamp Dealers' Directory, and started a stamp dealership with his friends.

At about the same time Frank embarked upon his lifetime infatuation with the theater, a devotion which would repeatedly lead him to failure and near-bankruptcy. His first such failure occurred when a local theatrical company duped him into replenishing their stock of costumes, with the promise of leading roles that never came his way. Disillusioned, Baum left the theatre—temporarily—and went to work as a clerk in his brother-in-law's dry goods company in Syracuse. At one point, he found another clerk locked in a store room dead, an apparent suicide. This incident appears to have inspired his locked room story, "The Suicide of Kiaros".

At the age of 20, Baum took on a new vocation: the breeding of fancy poultry, which was a national craze at the time. He specialized in raising a particular breed of fowl, the Hamburg chicken. In 1880 he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record, and in 1886, when Baum was 30 years old, his first book was published: The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.

Yet Baum could never stay away from the stage long. He continued to take roles in plays, performing under the stage names of Louis F. Baum and George Brooks.

In 1880, his father built him a theatre in Richburg, New York, and Baum set about writing plays and gathering a company to act in them. The Maid of Arran, a melodrama with songs based on William Black's novel A Princess of Thule, proved a modest success. Baum not only wrote the play but composed songs for it (making it a prototypical musical, as its songs relate to the narrative), and acted in the leading role. His aunt, Katharine Gray, played his character's aunt. She was the founder of Syracuse Oratory School, and Baum advertised his services in her catalog to teach theatre, including stage business, playwriting, directing, and translating (French, German, and Italian), revision, and operettas, though he was not employed to do so. On November 9, 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, a daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a famous women's suffrage activist. While Baum was touring with The Maid of Arran, the theatre in Richburg caught fire during a production of Baum's ironically-titled parlor drama, Matches, and destroyed not only the theatre, but the only known copies of many of Baum's scripts, including Matches, as well as costumes and props.

The South Dakota years

In July 1888, Baum and his wife moved to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, where he opened a store, "Baum's Bazaar". His habit of giving out wares on credit led to the eventual bankrupting of the store, so Baum turned to editing a local newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, where he wrote a column, "Our Landlady". Baum's description of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is based on his experiences in drought-ridden South Dakota. During much of this time, Matilda Joslyn Gage was living in the Baum household. While he was in South Dakota Baum sang in a quartet that included a man who would become one of the first Populist (People's Party) Senators in the U.S., James Kyle.

Baum becomes an author

Promotional Poster for Baum's "Popular Books For Children", 1901.
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Promotional Poster for Baum's "Popular Books For Children", 1901.

After Baum's newspaper failed in 1891, he, Maud and their four sons moved to Chicago, where Baum took a job reporting for the Evening Post. For several years he edited a magazine for advertising agencies focused on window displays in stores. The major department stores created elaborate Christmas time fantasies, using clockwork mechanism that made people and animals appear to move. He also had to work as a traveling salesman.

In 1897 he wrote and published Mother Goose in Prose, a collection of Mother Goose rhymes written as prose stories, and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. Mother Goose was a moderate success, and allowed Baum to quit his door-to-door job.

In 1899 Baum partnered with illustrator W. W. Denslow, to publish Father Goose, His Book, a collection of nonsense poetry. The book was a success, becoming the best-selling children's book of the year.

The Baum-Denslow Mother Goose book used as free premium for breakfast cereal
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The Baum-Denslow Mother Goose book used as free premium for breakfast cereal

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

In 1900, Baum and Denslow (with whom he shared the copyright) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical and financial acclaim. The book was the best-selling children's book for two years after its initial publication. Baum went on to write thirteen other novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz.

Two years after Wizard's publication, Baum and Denslow teamed up with composer Paul Tietjens and director Julian Mitchell to produce a musical stage version of the book under Fred R. Hamlin. This stage version, the first to use the shortened title "The Wizard of Oz", opened in Chicago in 1902, then ran on Broadway for 293 stage nights from January to October 1903. It returned to Broadway in 1904, where it played from March to May and again from November to December. It successfully toured the United States with much of the same cast, as was done in those days, until 1911, and then became available for amateur use. The stage version starred David C. Montgomery and Fred Stone as the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow respectively, which shot the pair to instant fame. The stage version differed quite a bit from the book, and was aimed primarily at adults. Toto was replaced with Imogene the Cow, and Tryxie Tryfle, a waitress, and Pastoria, a streetcar operator, were added as fellow cyclone victims. The Wicked Witch of the West was eliminated entirely in the script, and the plot became about how the four friends, being allied with the usurping Wizard, were hunted as traitors to Pastoria II, the rightful King of Oz. It is unclear how much control or influence Baum had on the script; it appears that many of the changes were written by Baum against his wishes due to contractual requirements with Hamlin. Jokes in the script, mostly written by Glen MacDonough, called for explicit references to President Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Mark Hanna, and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Although use of the script was rather free-form, the line about Hanna was ordered dropped as soon as Hamlin got word of his death in 1904.

Beginning with the success of the stage version, most subsequent versions of the story, including newer editions of the novel, have been titled "The Wizard of Oz", rather than using the full, original title. In more recent years, restoring the full title has become increasingly common, particularly to distinguish the novel from the Hollywood film.

Following early film treatments in 1910 and 1925, Metro Goldwyn Mayer made the story into the now classic movie The Wizard of Oz (1939) starring Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale. Among other changes, the film was given an all-a-dream ending. Baum used this technique only once, in Mr. Woodchuck, and in that case the title character explicitly told the dreamer that she was dreaming numerous times. A completely new Tony Award-winning Broadway musical based on African-American musical styles, The Wiz was staged in 1975 with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy. It was the basis for a 1978 film by the same title starring Diana Ross as an adult Dorothy. The Wizard of Oz continues to inspire new versions such as Disney's 1985 Return to Oz, The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, and a variety of animated productions. Today's most successful Broadway show, Wicked provides a backstory to the two Oz witches used in the classic MGM film. Wicked author Gregory Maguire chose to honor L. Frank Baum by naming his main character Elphaba -- a phonetic take on Baum's initials.

Later life and work

With the success of Wizard on page and stage, Baum and Denslow hoped lightning would strike a third time and in 1901 published Dot and Tot of Merryland. The book was one of Baum's weakest, and its failure further strained his faltering relationship with Denslow. It would be their last collaboration. Baum would work primarily with John R. Neill on his fantasy work beginning in 1904, but Baum met Neill few times (all before he moved to California) and often found Neill's art not humorous enough for his liking, and was particularly offended when Neill published without authorization.

Several times during the development of the Oz series, Baum declared that he had written his last Oz book and devoted himself to other works of fantasy fiction based in other magical lands, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Queen Zixi of Ix. However, persuaded by popular demand, letters from children, and the failure of his new books, he returned to the series each time. All of his novels have fallen into public domain in most jurisdictions, and many are available through Project Gutenberg. Even so, his other works remained very popular after his death, with The Master Key appearing on St. Nicholas Magazine's survey of readers' favorite books well into the 1920s.

Because of his lifelong love of theatre, he often financed elaborate musicals, often to his financial detriment. One of Baum's worst financial endeavors was his The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908), which combined a slideshow, film, and live actors with a lecture by Baum as if he were giving a travelogue to Oz. However, Baum ran into trouble and could not pay his debts to the company who produced the films. He did not get back to a stable financial situation for several years, after he sold the royalty rights to many of his earlier works, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This resulted in the M.A. Donahue Company publishing cheap editions of his early works with advertising that purported that Baum's newer output was inferior to the less expensive books they were releasing. Baum had shrewdly transferred most of his property, except for his clothing, his library (mostly of children's books, such as the fairy tales of Andrew Lang, whose portrait he kept in his study), and his typewriter (all of which he successfully argued were essential to his occupation), into Maud's name, as she handled the finances, anyway, and thus lost much less than he could have.

His final Oz book, Glinda of Oz was published a year after his death in 1920 but the Oz series was continued long after his death by other authors, notably Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote an additional nineteen Oz books.

Baum made use of several pseudonyms for some of his other, non-Oz books. They include:

  • Edith Van Dyne (the Aunt Jane's Nieces series)
  • Laura Bancroft (Twinkle and Chubbins, Policeman Bluejay)
  • Floyd Akers (The Boy Fortune Hunters series, continuing the Sam Steele series)
  • Suzanne Metcalf (Annabel)
  • Schuyler Staunton (The Fate of a Crown, Daughters of Destiny)
  • John Estes Cooke (Tamawaca Folks)
  • Capt. Hugh Fitzgerald (the Sam Steele series)

Baum also anonymously wrote The Last Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile.

Baum continued theatrical work with Harry Marston Haldeman's men's social group, The Uplifters, for which he wrote several plays for various celebrations. He also wrote the group's parodic by-laws. The group, which also included Will Rogers, was proud to have had Baum as a member and posthumously revived many of his works despite their ephemeral intent. Prior to that, his last produced play was The Tik-Tok Man of Oz (based on Ozma of Oz and the basis for Tik-Tok of Oz), a modest success in Hollywood that producer Oliver Morosco decided did not do well enough to take to Broadway. Morosco, incidentally, quickly turned to film production, as would Baum.

In 1914, having moved to Hollywood years earlier, Baum started his own film production company, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, which came as an outgrowth of the Uplifters. He served as its president, and principal producer and screenwriter. The rest of the board consisted of Louis F. Gottschalk, Harry Marston Haldeman, and Clarence R. Rundel. The films were directed by J. Farrell MacDonald, with casts that included Violet Macmillan, Vivian Reed, Mildred Harris, Juanita Hansen, Pierre Couderc, Mai Welles, Louise Emmons, J. Charles Haydon, and early appearances by Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach. Richard Rosson appeared in one of the films, whose younger brother Harold Rosson photographed The Wizard of Oz (1939). After little success probing the unrealized children's film market, Baum came clean about who wrote The Last Egyptian and made a film of it (portions of which are included in Decasia), but the Oz name had, for the time being, become box office poison and even a name change to Dramatic Feature Films and transfer of ownership to Frank Joslyn Baum did not help. Unlike with The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, Baum invested none of his own money in the venture, but the stress probably took its toll on its health.

Baum died on May 6, 1919, aged 62, and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.

Baum's beliefs

Literary

Baum's avowed intentions with the Oz books, and other fairy tales, was to tell such tales as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen told, bringing them up to date by making the characters not stereotypical dwarfs or genies, and by removing both the violence and the moral the violence was to point to.[1] Although the first books contained a fair amount of violence, it decreased with the series; in The Emerald City of Oz, Ozma objected to doing violence even to the Nomes who threaten Oz with invasion.[2]

Another traditional element that Baum intentionally omitted was the emphasis on romance, as he regarded romantic love as uninteresting and largely incomprehensible for young children. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the only element of romance lay in the backstory of the Tin Woodman, which explains his condition and does not otherwise affect the tale, and that of the Golden Cap; the only other stories with such elements were The Scarecrow of Oz and Tik-Tok of Oz, both based on dramatizations, which Baum regarded warily until his readers accepted them.[3]

Political

Women's Suffrage

Sally Roesch Wagner of The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation has published a pamphlet titled The Wonderful Mother of Oz describing how Matilda's radical feminist politics were sympathetically channelled by Baum into his Oz books. Much of the politics in the Republican Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer dealt with trying to convince the populace to vote for women's suffrage. Baum was the secretary of Aberdeen's Woman's Suffrage Club. When Susan B. Anthony visited Aberdeen, she stayed with the Baums. Nancy Tystad Koupal notes an apparent loss of interest in editorializing after Aberdeen failed to pass the bill for women's enfranchisement.

Some of Baum's contacts with suffragists of his day seem to have inspired much of his second Oz story, The Marvelous Land of Oz. In this story, General Jinjur leads the girls and women of Oz in a revolt by knitting needles, take over, and make the men do the household chores. Jinjur proves to be an incompetent ruler, but a female advocating equalism is ultimately placed on the throne. His Edith Van Dyne stories depict girls and young women engaging in traditionally masculine activities, and his girl sleuth Josie O'Gorman from The Bluebird Books is even less girly girl than Nancy Drew.

American Indian Genocide

During the events leading up to the Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum wrote an editorial for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer upon the death of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull stating:

The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.[4]

After the Massacre he wrote a second editorial repeating his earlier opinion and criticizing the government for not taking even harsher measures. This second editorial ran on January 3, 1891 and made further call for genocide as follows:

The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster. The PIONEER has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past. An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that 'when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre." [4][5]

These two short editorials continue to haunt his legacy. Matilda Joslyn Gage, a white feminist who was later adopted into the Mohawk nation, was living with Baum at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre, and none of the Baum family letters or journals of the time suggest any home strife as a result of this writing. In 2006, however, descendants of Baum apologized to the Sioux nation for any hurt their ancestor had caused.[6]

These editorials are the only known occasion on which Baum expressed such direct views, though less hostile remarks in some other writing used racist vocabulary or stereotyping typical of the day. His overall writing is remarkably inclusive and his characters diverse. For example, aside from the vocabulary, he did acknowledge many Americans of non-European ancestry in The Woggle Bug Book to an extent unheard of in other 1905 children's publications.[citation needed] The short story, "The Enchanted Buffalo", which purports to be a Native American fable, speaks respectfully of tribal peoples.[citation needed]

Political imagery in The Wizard of Oz

Main article: Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Although numerous political references to the "Wizard" appeared early in the 20th century, it was in a scholarly article in 1964 (Littlefield 1964) that there appeared the first full-fledged interpretation of the novel as an extended political allegory of the politics and characters of the 1890s. Special attention was paid to the Populist metaphors and debates over silver and gold.[7] As a Republican and avid supporter of Women's Suffrage, it is thought that Baum personally did not support the political ideals of either the Populist movement of 1890-92 or the Bryanite-silver crusade of 1896-1900. He published a poem[1] in support of William McKinley.

Since 1964 many scholars, economists and historians have expanded on Littlefield's interpretation, pointing to multiple similarities between the characters (especially as depicted in Denslow's illustrations) and stock figures from editorial cartoons of the period. Littlefield himself wrote the New York Times letters to the editor section spelling out that his theory had no basis in fact, but was developed simply as a tool to help bored summer school students remember their history lesson.

Baum's newspaper had addressed politics in the 1890s, and Denslow was an editorial cartoonist as well as an illustrator of children's books. A series of political references are included in the 1902 stage version, such as references by name to the President and a powerful senator, and to John D. Rockefeller for providing the oil needed by the Tin Woodman. Scholars have found few political references in Baum's Oz books after 1902.

When Baum himself was asked whether his stories had hidden meanings, he always replied that they were written to please children and generate an income for his family.

Fans of the Oz books dismiss any political interpretation, and argue that Baum and Denslow had no interest in promoting any kind of political agenda.

Religious

Originally a Methodist, Baum joined the Episcopal Church in Aberdeen in order to participate in community theatricals. Later, he and his wife, encouraged by Matilda Joslyn Gage, became theosophists, in 1897. Baum's beliefs are often reflected in his writing. The only mention of a church in his Oz books is the porcelain one which the Cowardly Lion breaks in the Dainty China Country in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Baums also sent their older sons to "Ethical Culture Sunday School" in Chicago, which taught morality but not religion.

Further information

  • When Baum was writing The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, he once missed a typographical error which noted a woman's "roughish smile" instead of a "roguish smile." Legend has it, he was describing a bride at her wedding, and her husband was so irate that he challenged Baum to a gun duel. The two men were to stand back to back on one street, come around the corner, face each other, and shoot. Allegedly, Baum heard guns go off during the corner turn and started to run, and a man stopped him and said "you fool, the other guy's running!" Nancy Tystad Koupal accessed all microfilms of the Pioneer and found only one instance of "roughish smile." The woman described was, in fact, an actor in a community theatre production that Baum had inadvertently wandered in on. However, Baum adapts the legend in Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation. Louise Merrick makes that mistake of describing Molly Sizer as having a "roughish smile" in the society pages, and the Sizers, "noted as quite the most aggressive and disturbing element in the neighborhood", send eldest son Bill to challenge Arthur Weldon, Louise's husband and the highest name on the masthead (though in fact he has almost no involvement in the paper at all), to a duel, after which Arthur's experience parallels Baum's.
  • Baum was left handed, and gave the trait to his character, Ojo, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Ojo believes himself to be unlucky because of his left-handedness, but ultimately becomes known as Ojo the Lucky.
  • When the wardrobe department of MGM began to buy costumes for the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz, they purchased second hand clothes from rummage sales around Hollywood. Actor Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard, was given one such second-hand overcoat to wear, and he happened to notice that the lining of the coat had a label saying, "Property of L. Frank Baum". In early publicity for the movie, MGM emphasized that this was a true story. Soon after the movie was released, the coat was taken to Baum's wife, who confirmed that it had been his (see [2]). Michael Patrick Hearn stated in his keynote address before the 2000 International Wizard of Oz Club convention that this story is believed by Baum's descendants, as well as Margaret Hamilton, to be a concoction of MGM's marketing department. The whereabouts of any such coat are unknown, and fakery would not be difficult.
  • A very popular myth about the origin of the name "Oz" is that it was inspired by the labels on the author's filing cabinet: A-N, O-Z. Less popular is the myth that it stood for the abbreviation for "ounce". Still another story is that Baum, as an admirer of Charles Dickens, took his nickname, "Boz" and dropped the "B" for "Baum". However, according to the ([3]) International Wizard of Oz Club, L. Frank Baum's widow, Maud, once wrote to writer Jack Snow on this subject and stated that it was just a name that Frank had created out of his own mind. Snow himself had postulated (in a posthumously published unused introduction to The Shaggy Man of Oz) that the name came from children's "ohhs" and "ahhs" when Baum told the stories aloud.
  • John Ritter portrayed Baum in a 1990 made for TV movie, The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story. The film was largely fiction, but retained some of the basic details of Baum's life such as the many failures of his adult life before Oz and a few of the elements that inspired the books. Interestingly, it takes the duel story and turns Baum into a hero, with only the other guy running, something that was never part of the legend.
  • In the Broadway show Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire's novel, the character Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) was named after Baum. Elphaba was combined from his name, L. Frank Baum.
  • OZcot was the name of Baum's home in Hollywood.

Bibliography


Including those listed here and on the Oz books page, Michael Patrick Hearn has identified forty-two titles of stage plays associated with Baum, some probably redundant or reflective of alternate draughts, many for works that Baum may never have actually started. Listed below and under non-Canon works by canon Oz authors, are those either known to have been performed (such as the lost plays of his youth) or that exist in at least fragmentary or treatment form.

Oz works

Main: List of Oz books

  1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
  2. The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
  3. Ozma of Oz (1907)
  4. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)
  5. The Road to Oz (1909)
  6. The Emerald City of Oz (1910)
  7. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913)
  8. Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
  9. The Scarecrow of Oz (1915)
  10. Rinkitink in Oz (1916)
  11. The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
  12. The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)
  13. The Magic of Oz (1919--posthumously published)
  14. Glinda of Oz (1920--posthumously published)
  • Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz (1905)
  • The Woggle-Bug Book (1905)
  • Little Wizard Stories of Oz (1913)
Princess Truella, a character from The Magical Monarch of Mo
Enlarge
Princess Truella, a character from The Magical Monarch of Mo

Non-Oz works

  • Baum's Complete Stamp Dealer's Directory (1873)
  • The Mackrummins (lost play, 1882)
  • The Maid of Arran (play, 1882)
  • Matches (lost play, 1882)
  • Kilmourne, or O'Connor's Dream (lost? play opened 4 April 1883)
  • The Queen of Killarney (lost? play, 1883)
  • Our Landlady (newspaper stories, 1890-1891)
  • The Book of the Hamburgs (poultry guide, 1896)
  • By the Candelabra's Glare (poetry, 1897)
  • Mother Goose in Prose (prose retellings of Mother Goose rhymes, (1897)
  • (nonsense poetry, 1899)
  • The Magical Monarch of Mo (Originally published in 1900 as A New Wonderland) (fantasy, 1903)
  • The Army Alphabet (poetry, 1900)
  • The Navy Alphabet (poetry, 1900)
  • The Songs of Father Goose (Father Goose, set to music by Alberta N. Hall Burton, 1900)
  • The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (trade publication, 1900)
  • Dot and Tot of Merryland (fantasy, 1901)
  • American Fairy Tales (fantasy, 1901)
  • (fantasy, 1901)
  • The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902)
  • The Enchanted Island of Yew (fantasy, 1903)
  • Queen Zixi of Ix (fantasy, 1905)
  • John Dough and the Cherub (fantasy, 1906)
  • Father Goose's Year Book: Quaint Quacks and Feathered Shafts for Mature Children (nonsense poetry for adults, 1907)
  • Mortal for an Hour or The Fairy Prince or Prince Marvel (play, 1909)
  • The Pipes O' Pan (play, 1909, with George Scarborough) (only the first act was ever completed)
  • L. Frank Baum's Juvenile Speaker; Readings and Recitations in Prose and Verse, Humorous and Otherwise (also known as Baum's Own Book for Children) (collection of revised work, 1910)
  • The Daring Twins: A Story for Young Folk (novel, 1911 (reprinted in 2006 as The Secret of the Lost Fortune))
  • The Sea Fairies (fantasy, 1911)
  • Sky Island (fantasy, 1912)
  • (novel, 1912)
  • Our Married Life (novel, 1912) [lost]
  • Johnson (novel, 1912) [lost]
  • King Bud of Noland, or The Magic Cloak (musical play, 1913; music by Louis F. Gottschalk, revised as the scenario to the film, The Magic Cloak of Oz)
  • Molly Oodle (novel, 1914) [lost]
  • The Mystery of Bonita (novel, 1914) [lost]
  • Stagecraft, or, The Adventures of a Strictly Moral Man (musical play, 1914; music by Louis F. Gottschalk)
  • The Uplift of Lucifer, or Raising Hell: An Allegorical Squazosh (musical play, music by Louis F. Gottschalk, 1915)
  • The Uplifter's Minstrels (musical play, 1916; music by Byron Gay)
  • The Orpheus Road Show: A Paraphrastic Compendium of Mirth (