Name: BAUM, Lyman Frank Aged: 64
Born: May 15, 1856 Where: Mattydale, New York
Died: May 5, 1919 Where: Hollywood, California
Interred: Forest Lawn, Glendale, California
Married: Maud Gage When: November 9, 1882

Baum entered life on the yellow brick road. His father, Benjamin Baum, had made a fortune in the Pennsylvania oil fields and built a country estate, known as 'Rose Lawn,' at Mattydale, NY, where Frank was born.

Baum had enough financial backing to be unsuccessful and survive. In his youth he pursued multiple interests with mixed success. In journalism, Baum started several newspapers and magazines; in theater, he wrote and acted in his own plays; but Frank was really interested in making his own fortune in business in 'the West.' After marriage and the birth of his first son, Baum relocated the family to Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1888 and started Baum's Bazaar. When that closed during hard times, Baum started a local newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, and published his first issue on January 25th, 1890.

When the Pioneer failed, Baum relocated to Chicago and worked as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post. Simultaneously, Frank worked as a traveling saleman and began formulating ideas for children's stories. Baum would team with illustrator, W. W. Denslow, for the first time on Father Goose, His Book and then 1900's The Wizard of Oz. So successful was the latter, that a musical play was produced and toured the United States.

Baum had developed an interest in slide shows for children and the emerging film industry. Once again the Baums relocated, this time to Hollywood, California, and acquired an estate that they named Ozcot. The key to Frank's success in the early 1900s was the popularity of the Oz sequels. Baum's newly formed Oz Film Manufacturing Company was a limited and somewhat disappointing success.

Twenty years after Frank Baum's death, the fabulous Wizard of Oz movie was made and raised Baum to the level of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland. Most, if not all, of Science Fiction and Fantasy's Golden Age writers would be affected by it, with widely differing greats like Asimov, Piper, Tolkien, and Wollheim, among others, working in the juvenile field.

PEN NAMES: Floyd Akers, Laura Bancroft, John Estes Cooke, Edith Van Dyne, Captain Hugh Fitzgerald, Suzanne Metcalf, and Schuyler Staunton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

BIOGRAPHY: To Please a Child, Frank Joslyn Baum & Russell P. MacFall, 1961. A young-adult biography, L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz, Angelica Shirley Carpenter & Jean Shirley, 1992.

ONLINE BIOGRAPHY: Baum's checkered early career here and the OZ years here and the final years here.

OBITUARY:

George C. Willick, 514 East Street, Madison, IN 47250