L. Frank Baum biographies

With The Wonderful Wizard of Oz being a popular piece of Americana, of course people have wanted to know more about the life of the man who created it. Jack Snow, to my knowledge, was the first to attempt a Baum biography, though he was unable to complete it. In the back of Who's Who in Oz, he did include a biographical sketch of Baum and the other writers and illustrators of the (then) thirty-nine Oz books. The printed version has Baum's biography span four pages: the longest of the biographies. In its brevity, it shows a few inaccuracies, but that was due to the limited information available at the time.

The first book-length Baum biography was To Please A Child, published in 1961 by Reilly & Lee as part of their attempt to relaunch the Oz series. (This joined picture book versions of the first four Oz books, The Visitors from Oz picture books, and soon Merry-Go-Round in Oz and the White Edition Oz books.) The book was by Frank Joslyn Baum and Russell P. MacFall. However, Frank J. Baum had died during the writing process, leaving MacFall to try to tie what was left together. This led to many inaccuracies in the text and even a few cases of MacFall inventing situations out of whole cloth, including a brief mention of Baum leading a march in support of William Jennings Bryant. I have heard, though I'm unsure of the veracity of the claim, that Frank J. Baum actually didn't have a lot of research resources at hand.

Having heard about the inaccuracies, I had avoided getting To Please A Child for a long time, but when an Oz collector recently offered a nice copy for sale, I decided to go ahead and get it. The book contains many Baum family stories that may or may not be true (in the manner of Baum himself, sometimes the truth isn't such a great story), including the "Affair of the Bismarcks" and the famous origin of the word "Oz" from the filing cabinet. The book is also known for misportraying Maud Baum as a tyrannical mother and wife.

To me, one of the bigger issues was how MacFall offers a chronological life of Baum up until The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was released, then dedicates chapters to the success of the book and the series, breaking the chronological account of Baum's life. The remainder of Baum's life is retold rather simply in a few more chapters. It did, however, offer a few good bits of information: apparently not even ten years after Maud Baum's death, Ozcot was already torn down and an apartment building on its site.

Fortunately, by this time the International Wizard of Oz Club had been formed and was well underway with research of Baum's life and the creation of the Oz series, often finding where To Please A Child had dropped the ball. There have been many Baum biographies over the years, but I shall focus on the three that I've used for reference the most.

One cannot talk about Baum biographies without mentioning Michael Patrick Hearn. While he has yet to publish his critical biography of Baum (I have heard it is finished, they are simply awaiting a good time to release it, though Hearn probably is yet putting finishing touches on it), he did include a nice biography of Baum in his groundbreaking work The Annotated Wizard of Oz. While far from the first serious study of the Oz books, this book offered a reprint of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with annotations in which Hearn speculates on how the story is being told in the context of Baum's life and the larger work of the Oz series and the literary world. Thus, this put Oz in the eye of critically examined literature. The book was first published in 1973, but was heavily revised and expanded in 2000. (The shape of the book changed in 2000, so it was less like the original edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.) The lengthy introduction by Hearn offers a lot of good information about Baum's life as well as numerous photos. The appendix includes a bibliography of Baum's works.

Hearn's research was later used as the basis of the 1991 television film The Dreamer of Oz, though, in Baum tradition, that film took many opportunities to make the truth sound like a better story.

Mother and daughter pair Jean Shirley and Angelica Shirley Carpenter (now a former Oz Club president and a friend) produced L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz in 1992. While aimed at young readers, this biography was actually very well-done and researched and featured numerous pictures, definitely benefiting from the research that had been published in The Baum Bugle.

Finally is Katherine M. Rogers' L. Frank Baum: The Creator of Oz, published in 2002. A more studious biography of Baum's life, it is able to put his life and works into a good historical perspective with quite a bit more research.

While not Baum biographies, I should make mention of two books edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal: Our Landlady and Baum's Road to Oz, both of which focus on Baum's years in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

The less studious might ask, "Why get multiple biographies of someone? Shouldn't one good one be enough?" Perhaps, if one just wishes to know about the person's life, but to my knowledge, there is not a biography of a person that has been declared "definitive," in that that one book contains all the information you'd need to know about a person's life. Although I do look forward to the day Michael Patrick Hearn releases his critical Baum biography, I doubt that book will be the be all and end all source of information about Baum. Multiple sources of information are always best on a topic.

The Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay

The screenplay for MGM's The Wizard of Oz is, today, available in a variety of editions. Copies of the screenplay were included with The Ulitmate Oz laserdisc collection and the Gift Set Edition of the DVD in 1999. But the first time it was published was in 1989 by Delta, a division of Dell Publishing.

The screenplay included was based on the continuity script prepared for the movie's original cut. Editor Michael Patrick Hearn (who had previously become famous in Oz world for The Annotated Wizard of Oz and had also annotated Huckleberry Finn and A Christmas Carol, and was already at work on his yet to be published biography of L. Frank Baum) reduced it to what was in the finished film. Deleted pieces of dialogue and scenes showed up as footnotes and appendixes.

Hearn writes a foreword that discusses how the script came to be written. The rejected drafts are mentioned, but it details how the final script it mainly the work of Noel Langley, revised heavily by Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, revised by Langley again, and finally a few uncredited (but important) tweaks from John Lee Mahin.

Included is the script for the deleted "Rainbow Bridge" sequence which was an alternate version of occurrences in the Wicked Witch's castle, cutting in right after Dorothy sees the Wicked Witch in the crystal ball. The Witch puts Dorothy to work, and she sings "Over the Rainbow" as she cleans the Witch's castle as the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion come to her rescue. The Witch is inspired by the song to create a rainbow bridge leading from one tower to another that would support one for awhile before they fall to a gruesome death, which she tests with a Winkie guard. Dorothy's friends arrive and wait in the opposite tower, as Dorothy tries the bridge. The Ruby Slippers keep her safe, though, and so the chase we know from the finished film ensues.

Also included are additional lyrics that were never intended for the movie: additional opening lyrics for "Over the Rainbow," "Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!," "Off To See The Wizard," "If I Only Had A...," "The Merry Old Land of Oz," and alternate lyrics for "The Jitterbug." A lot of those will be familiar with Oz audiophiles, but Hearn surprises with an additional British sheet music verse for "Over the Rainbow":

Once by a word only lightly spoken
All your dreams are broken
For a while,
Sadness comes and joy goes by;
But ev'ry tear like the rain descending
Finds a happy ending
In a smile,
Doubts and fears all fade and die
To the blue beyond the grey
Love again will find its way...

This book as it is seems to be unavailable in a new edition. Looking at used copies on Amazon tonight, third-party copies went from under $1 to $40. No other edition of the script I've seen online has a credit for Hearn, but that doesn't mean that the additional material might not have been included in any others, or if the complete continuity script was reprinted. I have not seen any other editions in person, so I can't say for sure. If you have any more information on these, I'd be glad to hear about them. Otherwise, this is the only edition I can recommend.

EDIT: I have been informed that the script included with the Ultimate Oz collection is the complete continuity script. The same script was reprinted in 1999 for the DVD Gift Set, and a "Loose Leaf" edition is listed on Amazon. Premiere Magazine reprinted the script, but it appears to be only the script of the finished film. Any edition published by Faber and Faber is simply a United Kingdom edition of the book I have detailed above with Hearn's work. (Thanks, Kurt Raymond.)

Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years

This little book might not look like much, and some casual Oz fans might not be interested at all. What it is a collection of two essays by Michael Patrick Hearn and Nancy Tystad Koupal about Baum's life in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

This time in the frontier is believed to be one of the most critical influences on Baum's later life, and Koupal believes that it is one of the most misunderstood sections of Baum's life due to how under-documented it is.

Hearn takes us to the baseball diamond in "The Wizard Behind The Plate" as he examines the baseball phenomenon during Baum's time in Aberdeen, including Baum's own contribution to it and the earliest connections of Oz and baseball.

Following it is a selected number of verse by Baum about baseball.

Next up is Koupal's extensive essay about Baum's interest in Spiritualism and his writing during Aberdeen, examining the times and Baum's activities extensively, putting it all in context. Following this is a generous selection of Baum's work from The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer.

Mark I. West examines "The Dakota Fairy Tales of L. Frank Baum," looking at stories from Animal Fairy Tales and Twinkle and Chubbins that deal with distinctly Dakota-based settings and themes. Following this is Baum's story "The Discontented Gopher."

Almost a hidden Easter egg in the book is the Appendix. It's listed as an "Appendix" in the table of contents, but when you get to it, it's the essay "What Children Want" by Baum himself, in which he discusses what he believes children ask for in their stories. I think he gets many points right: the blatantly moralized story from childhood is forgotten in the splendid wonder tale they enjoyed.

It dates from November 1902, and contains a good piece of evidence that Baum wasn't really incensed against W.W. Denslow after they parted ways. He writes that "I am not sure that the great modern illustrators of children's books, such as Peter Newell, Oliver Herford, Fanny Y. Cory, and W.W. Denslow, are not worthy as much as much love and reverence as the great story-writers themselves." (Cory also illustrated The Master Key and later The Enchanted Island of Yew for Baum.)

Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years seems to be out of print, and is going for over $30 on any site I can find. However, for anyone wanting to read up on Baum's life, I'd highly recommend this one.

W. W. Denslow - A Biography by Douglas Greene and Michael Patrick Hearn

I knew my knowledge of W. W. Denslow—the original illustrator of Oz—was lacking. In fact, it's not at all an exaggeration to say that when it comes to the original writers and illustrators of the Oz series, Baum is the most documented.

Anyway, I knew that there had been a biography of Denslow by Douglas Greene and Michael Patrick Hearn, so I decided to pick it up.

Denslow's story, compared with the lives of many others connected to Oz, is not a happy one. Despite a promising start in a career as an artist and even a brief stint as a cowboy, Denslow made some poor decisions in his career, partly based on his ego.

Also, Denslow had little success in his romantic life. He divorced his first wife when she was pregnant with his only child. His second marriage lasted a bit longer, but it was strained by his desire to get away from Chicago and re-locate to New York. It also ended in divorce. He and his third wife had separated in 1913, two years before his death.

Some of Denslow's life was surprising to discover, such as his early work painting advertising signs (after reading Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work, I really had to wonder what Baum would have thought had he heard about that) and his giving up alcohol and championing sobriety.

It is surprising to discover how varied Denslow's output could be. His grim lithograph "What's the Use?" depicted a skull wearing a crown of laurel, while when he created picture books for children, he would remove mentions of death or severe punishments for the baddies, believing that children should not be given such grim subjects in their entertainment.

Another recent Denslow purchase of mine, Denslow's Picture Book Treasury, has examples of this: Old Mother Hubbard has been almost completely rewritten, removing "She went to the baker to buy him some bread, but when she came back, the poor dog was dead." Animal Fair is rewritten to remove mentions of the drunk monkey that sat on an elephant's trunk with disastrous results.

Taking these into mind, his work for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Father Goose: His Book—depicting Kalidahs falling to their doom, the severed head of the wildcat, a dead wolf and Jack holding a severed giant's head—falls somewhere in between Denslow's double-sided output. Indeed, the idea that the modern child "gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident" as noted in the introduction of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz feels like it is more Denslow's ideal than Baum's.

The biography itself is well-written, easy to read, and very well researched. However, compared to biographies of Baum, the descriptions of Denslow's life feel sparse. This is not a fault so much as the fact that this is the first book-length biography of Denslow. The earliest biographies often don't have rich detail, especially when the person they profile has been dead for about sixty years. It is often hoped that later biographies will build on the research laid down in the first, but in the case of Denslow, none have surfaced. Either there has been little interest in the study of Denslow's life or little has been found to build onto this biography.

The only problem I had with the book was the use of pictures. We are given only two photos of Denslow (if there were more on the dustjacket, my copy didn't come with one and I can't find a picture of it), one of him in 1899, and another of him as a child, and these are in the front matter. Examples of Denslow's work are bundled into two sections of pages, going from 46 to 61 and from 142 to 158, when it would have been nicer to see these interspersed with the text in relevant locations. The examples are broad and generous to be sure, but this interrupts the text. All the pictures are printed in black and white and on the same type of paper as the text, so this error goes to design rather than the publisher's paper requirements.

A thorough listing of Denslow's work follows the biography, as well as a bibliography and a section of notes.

W. W. Denslow should be read by Oz scholars to help us better appreciate the man who first gave us a look at our favorite fairyland.