Author: L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, New York, into a wealthy family that owned oil interests in Pennsylvania. His early career was famously erratic. He tried theatre, sold axle grease, ran a dry-goods store in South Dakota during the bust years of the 1890s, edited a small newspaper there with notably unpleasant editorials about Native Americans that have hurt his reputation in recent decades, then moved to Chicago and worked as a traveling salesman of fine china while writing children's books in the evenings.His first significant success was Father Goose: His Book in 1899, a collection of nonsense verse. The following year he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, illustrated by W. W. Denslow, and that book changed his life. The Oz novels became Baum's main literary project for the rest of his life. He wrote fourteen of them. He also produced the Aunt Jane's Nieces books under a pseudonym, the Sea Fairies fantasies, the Animal Fairy Tales, the Mary Louise series, plus the failed stage musical adaptations of his own work and an unsuccessful film production company called the Oz Film Manufacturing Company in Hollywood.He was a difficult businessman, repeatedly bankrupting himself by taking on theatrical ventures he could not afford. He had four sons. He was a devoted husband to Maud Gage Baum, the daughter of the suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who probably influenced the strong female characters in Oz. He died in 1919 in Hollywood after a long illness. His last words to Maud were reported as Now I can cross the Shifting Sands, a reference to the desert that surrounds the country of Oz in his books. The Oz series continued without him under several other authors, but the fourteen Baum-authored novels remain the canonical core.