The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum

by Rebecca Loncraine

In the first major literary biography of L. Frank Baum, Rebecca Loncraine tells the story of Oz as you've never heard it, with a look behind the curtain at the vivid life and eccentric imagination of its creator.

L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899 and it was first published in 1900. A runaway hit, it was soon recognized as America's first modern fairy tale. Baum's life story, like the fictional world he created, is uniquely American, rooted in the transforming historical changes of his times. Baum was a complex and eccentric man who could never stay put for long; his restless creative spirit and voracious appetite for new projects led him across the U.S. during his lifetime, and he drew energy and inspiration from each new dramatic landscape he encountered,. Born in 1856, Baum spent his youth in the Finger Lakes region of New York as amputee soldiers returned from the Civil War; childhood mortality was also commonplace, blurring the lines between the living and the dead, and making room in Baum's young imagination for vividly real ghosts. When Baum was growing up, P. T. Barnum ruled the minds of small towns and his traveling circus was the most famous act around. Baum married a headstrong young woman named Maud Gage and they ventured out west to Dakota Territory, where they faced violent tornadoes, Ghost Dancing tribes and desperate droughts, before trading the hardships on the Great Plains for the excitement of Chicago and the fantastical White City of the World's Fair.

Baum's writing tapped into an inner world that blurred his own sense of reality and fantasy. The Land of Oz, which Baum believed he had "discovered" rather than invented, grew into something far bigger and more popular than he'd ever imagined. After the roaring success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he became a kind of slave to his creation, trapped inside Oz as his army of demanding child fans kept sending him back there to create new adventures for Dorothy, Toto and the humbug wizard. He went on to write thirteen sequels to his first Oz book. He also wrote the first Broadway adaptations of his Oz tales, and turned his Oz books into some of the first motion pictures in a small and undiscovered rural settlement called "Hollywood". Baum co-founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, even as critics warned that no one would pay to see a children's story. And they were right- his early ventures were box office flops and the world was not ready for Oz on screen until 1939, when MGM released "The Wizard of Oz" in brilliant Technicolor. Baum was not around to see it-he'd died in bed in 1919 just weeks after completing his final Oz book. But the book and film alike have become classics, just as well-loved today as they were when they first appeared.

The Real Wizard of Oz is an imaginatively written work that stretches the genre of biography and enriches our understanding of modern fairytales. L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its thirteen sequels, lived during eventful times in American history-- from 1856 to 1919-- that influenced nearly every aspect of his writing, from the Civil War to Hollywood, which was emerging as a modern Emerald City full of broken dreams and humbug wizards, to the gulf between America's prairie heartland, with its wild tornadoes, and its cities teeming with "Tin Man" factory workers. This is a colorful portrait of one man's vivid and eccentric imagination and the world that shaped it. Baum's famous fairytale is filled with the pain of the economic uncertainties of the Gilded Age and with a yearning for real change, ideas which many contemporary Americans will recognize. The Wizard of Oz continues to fascinate and influence us because it explores universal themes of longing for a better world, homesickness and finding inner strength amid the storms.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, American History, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Classics

360 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2009

Reviews

[Stewart Tame · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up with the Oz books. My childhood was spent happily, not just with Dorothy and Toto and the Scarecrow and so on, but also with Tik Tok, the Woggle Bug, Princess Ozma, the Shaggy Man, Scraps, the Glass Cat, the Saw Horse, Jack Pumpkinhead, and countless others. To this day, I can still tell you the difference between a Munchkin, a Winkie, a Gillikin, and a Quadling.

So my expectations were high going into this book. What could life have been like for the man responsible for so many wonderful characters? Turns out that he was exceptional in some ways, and quite ordinary in others, much like any of us, really. L. Frank Baum went from rags to riches and back again. He was an early photography buff, and lived to see the dawn of the electric era, automobiles, and the beginnings of the motion picture industry. In some ways, he was the J.K. Rowling of the early 1900s. The Oz books were wildly popular. There was even a successful stage musical based on the first book.

Rebecca Loncraine has done a masterful job of bringing history to life. There is so much telling detail in the settings and in the events that were taking place in the world at the time. Baum was an early supporter of women's rights--indeed, his mother-in-law was Matilda Gage, one of the founding figures in the American women's suffrage movement.

Although most people familiar with Oz know it from the MGM movie rather than the books, Loncraine deals with the film's debut in passing. There are two main reasons for this. First, the story of the movie has been covered in exhaustive detail in numerous books already. And second, Baum died in 1919, twenty years before the movie was released, though his widow was present at the premiere. True, there are significant differences between the book and the movie, but both are wonderful in their own way.

Although it's been ages since I read any of the Oz books, they live strongly in my memory. It was definitely an interesting and rewarding experience to get to know the man who wrote them. This is a fine book, and it is highly recommended.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't recall why I decided to read this, but am so glad I did!

True to its title, this is indeed "the life" and "the times," with equal emphasis on both — although I frankly found "the times" the more interesting of the two. The book is actually arranged in sections based on where Baum was living at the time, and so he moves Forrest Gump-like from Upstate New York (where he is peripherally involved in both the women's suffrage and "spiritualism" movements, the latter in large part a reaction to the horrific casualty figures of both the Civil War and high rate of infant mortality at the time), to the Great Plains (where he is witness or at least a neighbor to the last stages of the Indian Wars and the attrocities at Wounded Knee), to Chicago (where he arrives just in time for the World Columbian Exposition's "White City"), and finally out to California (where he is an early resident and participant in the rise of Hollywood). And as an early tech nerd, we also share in his joy in purchasing one of the first Kodak cameras (which came preloaded, and was then returned complete to Rochester for processing and replacement), an early Model T (when they were still handmade) and other innovations — cross-country train travel, X-rays, bicycles, and a little thing called electricity.

Baum himself is a fairly complex (if never truly captivating) character, and by the end of the book I still couldn't tell if he was ever actually happy or satisfied with his life. A failure in most of his early careers — actor, traveling salesman, shopkeeper, newspaperman — he even manages to go broke at least once more after making a fortune with his Oz stories. (Indeed, he wrote many more non-Oz books than Oz [most under a variety of pen-names], and only returned to Oz reluctantly — and largely for the money — after wrapping up his original opus at the end of the sixth "canonical" book.)

While I've never been a huge fan of the Oz books* — which I only really became interested in via the outstanding MARVEL graphic adaptations by Skottie Young and Eric Shanower — the book does provide a lot of fascinating Oz-related trivia. The first book was turned into a "musical extravaganza" a mere two years after publication, touring the country for nine years, and earning Baum around $2 million in today's dollars, (the show's marketing boasted "a cast of one hundred people — mostly girls!"; and in fact, the second Oz book was written specifically with the idea of also turning it into a musical — hence General Jinjur's all-girl army, which was envisioned as a chorus line). In his late-50s, Baum also self-produced a trio of silent Oz movies prior to WWI ("The Patchwork Girl of Oz," "The Magic Cloak of Oz," and "His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz"), all of which are available on YouTube, and none of which are worth more than about five minutes of your time.

A few final random tidbits from the book:

• An early believer in Theosophy (a spiritualist belief that basically all things are alive), Baum's Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man characters intentionally represented the "animal, vegetable and mineral" categories — how had I never noticed that before??

• Good lord, there were a lot of fires back then! It seems that every description of every hotel Baum ever stayed in or theater he performed in ends with something along the lines of "and then a month later, it burned to the ground."

• Life on the Great Plains was apparently really depressing. Not only were people going crazy and/or killing themselves by the score, but Baum himself went through some pretty dark times there; while expressing sympathy for the surviving Lakota after the massacre at Wounded Knee, he still concludes that "having wronged them for centuries, we had better…follow it up with one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth." I mean, yikes.

Anyway — despite the number of 2-star reviews here, I found this just fascinating as both a biography and a slice of late-19th Century history. And now I want to finish rereading the MARVEL books (which again, I cannot recommend highly enough), reread the also excellent (and also Skottie Young) Oz-parody "I Hate Fairyland" books; probably read the recent Toto; and finally watch "Wicked," (although no way I'll ever try to tackle that as a book again…once burned).
_________________________________

* In fact, as I child of the '60s I grew to hate the movie version, which in those pre-VCR days was one of the few films one could watch OVER and OVER, as it was shown every Thanksgiving on TV, and it somehow became a family tradition to watch the damn thing every time it was on.

[Carmine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am really struggling to get through this one. Lately I have had a rash of bad biographies. I loath biographers who either conjecture too much, insert themselves into the bio, or try to create meaning and connection where it may or may not have existed. Frank Baum's house at age 12 was next to a road paved with wood planks...it was poplar..poplar is yellowish when fresh cut....it must be the yellow brick road! (except the road had already been there for decaded before Baum and probably would have been pretty dirty by the time he was there, but you have to read through the lenthy 'history of the road in front of Baum's house' tangent.

ok, I think I am offically abandoning this book. It has failed to keep me engage on a subject I am genuinely interested in.
Abandoned on page 91 after reading a paragraph about:
a. another detailed description of the stock in Baum's Bazzaar store
b. Frank Baum's mustache
c. the reaction of the fish at the bottom of Lake Huron to shipwrecks
d. detailed description of midwestern winter weather
e. detailed description to prove what a natty dresser that Baum was
f. a few more topics
g. all of the above

...in one paragraph! A paragraph that pretty well illustrates what the previous 91 pages were like. I have not the energy at this time to hold all those tangental threads in my mind waiting for them to be woven back in later. Nor do I care to speculate at the state of shock experienced by Lake Huron fish if they did happen to see crates of Baum's shipwrecked stock sink to a watery grave.

[Kev Willoughby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe the poorest-written biography I have ever read. I lost track of how many times the author used phrases like "who knows" or "he must have" or "we don't know" or "perhaps" in order to speculate what could have happened when she otherwise had no evidence to support an assertion she wanted to make in order to create Frank Baum into who she wished him to be.

Ironically, the author consistently made fiction out of what should have been a non-fiction book.

While the many speculations might have been intended to give the reader a glimpse at what life may have been like surrounding Baum in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the author instead drew countless inferences of her own instead of allowing the reader to draw his / her own conclusions about the mindset of Baum and why he decided to write and how he may have been inspired to use his imagination to create the characters he penned to life.

If you're looking to learn more about turn-of-the-century culture, this book will lend some insight. But if you want to learn about the creator of "The Wizard of Oz," this book has much of the same information you can more quickly and easily find on Wikipedia.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book. It was on the shelf at the library, and I just grabbed it on a whim. It was an interesting read, for sure, but there were a couple of glaring problems with it that continued to make me roll my eyes and sigh.

The main problem was that the author perpetually made assumptions about the subject, L. Frank Baum. She specially did so during the first half of the book, which covered years that were probably - understandably - difficult to find material about. But this is supposed to be a Biography! The author can't just thrown in heavily veiled sentences as though they were fact!

For one example, the author described the estate that Baum grew up on for much of his childhood and teen years. The famous Plank Road ran behind it. She says that "Baum would have see the Plank Road curving north. The sixteen-mile toll road, built in 1846, was the first plank road in America. The planks became worn, cracked, and rutted from the extreme weather and use, and the old planks frequently had to be replaced. Fresh hemlock is a light yellowish color; when new planks were laid, the famous Plank Road would have curved, like a yellow band, through the countryside north of the estate." Now, the author never comes out and says that this is what inspired Baum to write about the "Yellow Brick Road," but she implies it, quite forcefully. And she makes similar statements throughout the book.

The other thing that I felt was wrong with the book is her constant side stories. Actually, it's more of a double-egdged sword. I LOVED most of her side stories; they were all about really interesting things that were going on around the country and the world at the same time as Baum's stories. I really enjoyed learning more about all sorts of things. The PROBLEM came when she tried to connect Baum to these other events. I felt like she was pulling whatever she could from the air to make Baum a part of these other events, even though there was never a relation.

For one example, she tells how Baum, as a teenager, is a voracious reader and especially loves to read anything by Charles Dickens. Then she launches on a side story about Dickens, how he grew up, how he would give dramatic readings and charge $2 for a ticket, and other very interesting tidbits. But then she tries to make more of a connection by saying that Dickens gave a reading in the neighboring town when Baum was 12 years old. She says that she doesn't know if he went to the reading, but that he would certainly have known about it.

For what it's worth, I did enjoy reading the book. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about a lot of different little things, rather than a factual account of L. Frank Baum.

[Kailey (Luminous Libro) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was too long-winded for me, and every little thing seemed to be drawn out unnecessarily. Some bits about Baum's history and his writing career were interesting, but mostly I skimmed a lot of a descriptive passages. There was a lot about the history of the times that had nothing to do with Baum, but I guess it was nice to see the historic events and trends that shaped his world. It just made the book longer though.

I wasn't particularly impressed with Baum as a person. He seems to have been rather childish and irresponsible, and stressed about money a lot; but all that could be said of almost every author ever.
He wrote a lot pot-boiler novels under various pseudonyms, but always was dragged back to Oz for more novels about Dorothy and her friends.

I didn't like that the author conjectured and guessed a lot about the origins of Baum's literary ideas. Some of it was a little far-fetched, but other times it seemed pretty obvious. For instance, I can certainly believe that since Baum lived through a drought out on the Mid-West prairie, then that influenced his writing Dorothy on a grey farm in Kansas. That's fine.
But some of the other "influences" on Baum's writing were complete guesswork.

I was mostly bored with this book, but there were a few interesting bits. Then again, biographies usually bore me, so it might just be me. I don't enjoy biographies that much.

[Terry Cornell · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my new favorites. Loncraine's biography of L. Frank Baum brings him and the times he lived back to life. I knew he wrote the 'Wizard of Oz' and several other Oz related books, but didn't know anything about the man. After watching "Oz the Great and Powerful", starring James Franco, I wanted to find out more about Baum and added this book to my reading list.

Baum became so many incarnations in his 62 years, its hard to fathom that most of it is in this book! Actor, playwright, theater manager, store owner, newspaper publisher/editor, journalist, traveling salesman, advocate for women's suffrage, early expert on design of department store window displays, and a father to four boys. I'm sure I left something out. I found the beginning a little slow describing his parent's and associated family life in early upstate New York, and thankfully a family tree of the members mentioned in the book is included. Loncraine does an excellent job of placing the reader in Baum's travels to New York City, the plains of the Dakota Territories, Chicago, and early Hollywood. My favorite is her description of the Chicago World Fair of 1892. The author also gives summaries of his writings--amazing how much he produced. Fourteen Oz related books, and forty-one other novels under various pen names. The book ends with the production of 1939's 'Wizard of Oz', and it's premier at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. My only disappointment is that the book did not include any photographs.

Loncraine did a a tremendous amount of research for this book, including spending a summer in New York , and traveling to the Dakotas. Sadly, Loncraine died of cancer at the age of 42 ending a short remarkable career as a writer. Her book 'Skybound' chronicling her battle with cancer, and her new experiences as a glider pilot was published posthumously.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I'm sure there's a fascinating biography to eventually be written about L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz series of children's books, because Baum was a fascinating guy -- a failed theatre veteran from the dawn of Broadway-style musicals, he cycled through a whole series of typical late-1800s entrepreneurial jobs (chicken breeder, frontier dry-goods dealer, newspaper editor) without much luck, before finally finding random fame and fortune as an author of juvenilia, immediately establishing a dysfunctional symbiotic relationship between upper-class trappings and Oz hatred that he then spent the rest of his life trying to rid himself of. But unfortunately The Real Wizard of Oz by British journalist Rebecca Loncraine is not that fascinating biography, namely because she falls too heavily into the "NPR trap" that plagues so many contemporary tomes; that in her desire to create a full-length book out of a novella's worth of material, so that she can go hit the intellectual talk-show circuit, she ends up writing a manuscript that can only be described as half-fluff, filled with the kind of barely causal "what if" digressions that make most lovers of smart biographies roll their eyes in annoyance. (Baum lived for a time in North Dakota, where there are a lot of tornados! He also lived for a time in Chicago, which used to possess a few streets made out of bricks that were slightly yellow-colored! Haahhh? Get it? HAAAAHHHH?!)

It's telling, I think, that Baum doesn't even reach adulthood in this overly padded book until a third of the way in, with that first third seemingly existing only to make the point that spiritualism and childhood deaths were a regular part of rural life in the 1800s, and that such things obviously had an effect on why Baum wrote the Oz books the way he did; the whole book feels like this, to tell you the truth, filled with obvious observations to mask the fact that there's simply not enough legitimately interesting things about Baum's life to fill a 300-page manuscript, and sometimes featuring nearly entire chapters of digressions about such barely connected topics as the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Although competently written, you should do yourself a favor anyway and simply read Baum's Wikipedia entry instead, and save yourself several days of easily skippable fluff.

Out of 10: 6.7

[Thomas Radigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read some of the Oz books as a child and of course having seen the movie, I never knew anything about the creator of the series until I read this book. It talks about his poor rural childhood and his family, and how then-current diseases killed so many people. mostly children and infants and how it affected his mentality, how the US Civil War indirectly did the same, how the technological revolutions and financial and social changes of his adulthood affected his views of the world, why he moved from Syracuse, New York to the Great Plains and then to Chicago and the different careers he tried gave him the ideas he placed into his various Oz books.

The author clearly had limited resources to work with and rather annoyingly used a lot of conjecture such as how Baum might have gone to certain places or done certain things. Not comprehensive, and could have used some editing, but good as an introduction to this famous but mysterious author.

[Chrystal Lee Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing! I'm a huge fan of L Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz. Like most people I had seen the 1939 movie of The Wizard of Oz when I was a kid, in my case in the 80s. I found out the movie was based on a book written by Baum around the same time. I got the chance to read the book again and discovered that this Oz book we love was the first of fourteen books written about the magical land of oz. I've read 7 of the 14 now after finding them in bookstores and libraries. After reading them I wondered where he got his ideas for the books. I happened to find this book and read it very quickly. By the end you've found out everything about Baum you'd ever want to know.

[Mateo Tomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Well researched, some fun and not so fun details about the mans life and his creations.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a mostly interesting, comprehensive biography of L. Frank Baum that sometimes reads like a history thesis. Baum's early life is not well-documented, so the author tends to make statements like "He must have felt like..." or "one can only imagine that..." in places where the facts run thin. Still, the book seems to parallel Baum's legacy in an interesting way. To this point, much of what I "knew" about Baum was based on a made-for-TV movie from 1990 (starring John Ritter as Baum). If this book is accurate, then the film glosses over and invents many interesting aspects of Baum's life, much like the timeless 1939 THE WIZARD OF OZ film takes license with the original work. Aside from that, Baum's story does not really seem unique: a dreamer/artist who struggles inadvertantly stumbles onto a fame with a creation he did not intend. Eventually after bad decisions and perhaps an overestimation of his own abilities, he goes back to his creation that initially brought him his fame-- grudgingly at first and finally, as a slave. This biography captures that bittersweetness well, but points of for a complete failure to mention how Gregory Maguire's books and the phenomenon that is WICKED have reignited Baum's legacy as the creator, chronicler, and Royal Historian of Oz.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This diligently researched and gracefully written biography provides a comprehensive account of the man who created what Rebecca Loncraine calls, America's modern fairy tale. She creates an exquisite portrait of the period between the mid-1800s and the first two decades of the 20th century. Baum's first Oz book (he went on to write thirteen sequels) reflected his experience in New York State's Finger Lakes region, the Great Plains, and other parts of the Midwest. He understood on the night he completed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (October 9, 1899) that he had done his best work. It seemed more like a discovery than an invention, Loncraine observes, and because the book took on a life of its own, Baum found himself in thrall to an audience that demanded still more stories from Oz. The biographer does not stint in her evocation of Baum's later years, when he tried to replicate the success of his book in Hollywood films-all of which were flops. A concluding chapter aptly describes the twenty-year period that culminated in the Technicolor transformation of Oz into a national epic, twenty years after Baum's death in 1919.

[Terri M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't often ready biographies, but I have had a lifelong love affair with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and after finally seeing Wicked on stage, I had to know more about the man that birthed Oz.

The writing was choppy and seemed forced which seemed to mirror Baum's haphazard life and career--moving from place to place never quite finding his equilibrium until he start writing and publishing his children's books. After reaching the end of the book, the final chapter or epilogue was probably the best writing in the book. The author, I feel, has a stronger affection for the movie than Baum and his original Oz novels based on the level of detail given towards the making of the 1939 classic movie. I do have a new found knowledge regarding the differences in the movie and the first Oz book. Since I finished the book, I have been asking myself, why would Dorothy wanted to return to dust bowl of Kansas in the middle of the Great Depression?

The book provides a great background on Baum's life. However, at times it feels like you are barely moving forward.

[Chris Aylott · Rating 3 out of 5]

More times than life, Loncraine's biography of L. Frank Baum is limited by the amount of information on his daily life. She is often reduced to supposition, claiming that he "would" have done this or seen that when there is apparently no record to confirm that he did. His creativity, his social conscience, and his poor business sense survive in the public record, but there doesn't seem to be much reliable record of his private life.

What Loncraine does well, however, is depict the world and places in which Baum lived. She presents the late nineteenth century as a time not unlike our own, full of upheaval from new technologies and social movements. It's not hard to see how the influences of the South Dakota landscape, theosophy, the theatre, spiritualism, his own chaotic finances, and the wounds and amputations of the Civil War crept into Baum's imagination and writing. (It's also encouraging to see that like many writers, Baum was a late bloomer who never fully understood his own creative process. Hope for the rest of us...)

[Christopher Obert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the biography of Wizard of Oz creator, L. Frank Baum. I very much enjoyed this book. I found Baum’s life extremely thought-provoking and as I read the book I found that I was routing him on! The book is enhanced by eight pages of photos (I wish there were more) that added a personal glimpse into Baum’s biography.

I have read that some of the book’s other reviewers did not like how much of the book was devoted to what was happening around Baum, i.e. thoughts and customs of the time in which he lived. But I found this added information very relevant to the biography. For example, if you read a story about a boy that wanted to explore the universe, it would be very important to know if they grew up in the 1930s-40s dreaming of being a spaceman like Flash and Buck, or in the 1960s-70s dreaming of being an astronaut like Neil and Buzz. Likewise, L. Frank Baum grew up in a time that greatly affected his stories. I think the author used the proper mix of personal story and American history to form the perfect blend!

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Stunt, dwarf, or destroy the imagination of a child and you have taken away its chances of success in life. Imagination transforms the commonplace into the great and creates the new out of the old." - L. Frank Baum


I LOVED this book. I love anything "Wizard of Oz." The author gave me a great insight into the life and mind of L. Frank Baum. I think she did a great job with this book.

[Christian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Only read to chapter 4 then stopped. Really wanted to like this book because of it's subject matter but couldn't continue reading it, author's style was to erratic.

If anyone can suggest another biography on Baum please let me know.

[Allison]

Kind of reads like a book report at times and makes a lot of assumptions, but still good.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

An interesting subject but not a great read. The biography was long-winded with too much conjecture.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 2 out of 5]

L. Frank Baum sure had an interesting life, but Loncraine goes a bit too far for this to be a good literary biography. My biggest takeaway is a better understanding of Baum's varied living places. He wrote the first Oz book in Chicago, and I never made the Chicago connection with him. There's now a Yellow Brick Road built in Humboldt Park, where he lived when he wrote that book.

We are treated to the histories of Baum's extended family members, the local seance scene in his hometown before he was born, and treatises on "the abolitionist North" (ha) and the Civil War, before we get to, you know, the real wizard of Oz. It's a fine line in biography between establishing the subject's world and remaining faithful to the subject as subject. I wondered at times if I was reading a history of America through the life of Baum and interpretation of the British Loncraine, or if this was the actual "life and times of L. Frank Baum."

Baum did have a very interesting family, particularly his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was known around the world for her views on women's rights and anti-religious sentiments. His life did span a time of great change and upheaval in America, and he was involved with various schemes that mirrored American projects, from Hollywood to the Columbian Exposition. But all of that cluttered up the biography, mostly due to the way Loncraine handled it. She inserted her own imaginations and conjectures into the biography, undermining her authority (where is the line between fact and fiction?) and refusing to cite quotations and specific information, making it nearly impossible for the reader to track down interesting rabbit trails. Sure, a lengthy works cited is proffered, but there are so many sources that anyone interested would have to do the level of research Loncraine did to find what they wanted.

Overall, this was still an interesting book. It just failed in its task of being "the first major literary biography of L. Frank Baum." The first? Well, I guess. Literary biography? If imagining the Chicago wind circling Baum as he writes, "With This Pencil, I wrote the MS of The Emerald City" counts as literary biography, sure, but after reading well-cited literary biographies like Uglow's Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, I have to say this one fails in the task.

For non-academic readers, this is an interesting look at Baum's life story and the vagaries of the times in which he lived. For researchers, plumb the works cited and keep moving. Loncraine can't decide between creative writing and biography, and I wonder if she would have been better served by writing biofiction about Baum. All this being said, Loncraine captures the spirit of Oz, the magic of Baum's created world, and the spark that has flamed in many childhood imaginations for over one hundred years. This is a biography for the fans of Oz, if not for the academic, which makes it worth reading for plenty of folks. I don't feel my time was wasted, but I do feel that my taste for literary biography was disappointed. Yet, after reading this, I long to pick up an Oz book again and get swept away with Dorothy Gale. The Dainty China Country is #aesthetic and I miss it. And who am I to say that, rather than a meticulously charted look at Baum's life, this longing is not Loncraine's goal?

[Ben Truong · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum is a biography of L. Frank Baum, an American author, popular for his children’s books the Oz series. Rebecca Loncraine was a noted British freelance writer, who wrote this biography.

Lyman Frank Baum was an American author chiefly famous for his children's books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts.

Divided into five sections, corresponding to the five U.S. regions in which he lived, Loncraine seeks to enshrine Baum as America's Grimm Brother, as devoted to his native land as he is to his fantasy world.

The most interesting sections cover his childhood in the Finger Lakes region of New York and his life as a storekeeper and newspaper publisher in the Great Plains. Loncraine's rich material includes the ideas and folktales populating each region-ghosts and mysticism, poverty and desire, and others.

The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum is researched rather well, however the execution seems lacking. Loncraine seemed determined to give equal attention to each area of Baum's life, which short-changes Baum's interpersonal relationships, as well as the ties between his life and his work.

Too often, Loncraine notes these connections but fails to dig into them, including what may have been the most fascinating part of Baum's tale, his decades-long marriage to a suffragist who was in every way his equal.

All in all, The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum is a somewhat well-written biography to the real man behind the curtain. It also ends my month-long delve into L. Frank Baum's work as this month marks the two-hundredth anniversary of his death.

[Lumberland · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book was entertaining and directly engaged the reader in an almost novel like way, I found it's presentation to be frustrating.

This book is clearly well researched, as the end notes prove, but the author provided zero internal citations for her claims. Consequently, when I read details that directly contradicted other reports (which the author herself admitted at times) I had no idea from where she was getting her information. Additionally it was hard to tell what was historical fact and what was speculation. Statements about what scents Baum found nostalgic seem not to be corroborated by any writings on his part, but rather by speculation based on the town he grew up in. Additionally, frequent and constant interjections about the time and place really helped illustrate Baum's world for me, but also clearly pushed towards the author's preoccupations (ie, continually returning to P. T. Barnum's exploitation of little people without ever connecting this exploitation to anything Baum witnessed, nor addressing the more probable ways generalized freak shows impacted his work. Presumably this association has some connection to the depiction of the Munchkins in the '39 film but this is never addressed either.) Other details, such as misspelling iconic character names (Mangaboos) or the instances near the end in which the author seems to conflate the film with the book are completely unacceptable in a published, researched, biography of a very popular author.

This book did give me a solid broader context for the late 1800s and early twentieth century American landscape in which Baum lived, but I feel unequipped to accurately understand his views. It provided more information about his childhood than any other account, but I do not know where that information came from and if it is reliable. It did help illuminate more ways in which his religious views impacted his work, which I greatly appreciated.

All in all I strongly dislike narrativizing in historical accounts, as well as the author's tendency to present her own speculation alongside facts without distinguishing between the two. If you like novelization of history, you will like this book. If you prefer a more factual approach, I'd suggest Rogers' L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz.

[Pierce Franco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I revisit Mr Baum's books (not only his Oz books), I convince myself that he was way too ahead of his time. He was a true visionary.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has captivated people's hearts for more than a century. Mr Baum couldn't foreseen the huge impact that his work would have... Nobody couldn't.

Up to this day, no one knew how his imagination works, probably he didn't quite understand it either. He conceived The Wonderful Wizard of Oz not as his greatest work, yet he c couldn't escape from it, not until he passed away.

Reading about the wonderful life of this man gives a complete new meaning to the things, to those little (and not so little) details that make up his work. He was born in a difficult time, where child death was so common, he survived when he's two older brothers (and a younger one) couldn't. But disease and child death weren't the only things that shaped his mind, that fed his fears. There was also the war, even though he never had to serve in any war.

Fears from his childhood (like a scarecrow), cyclones, limb amputation... He took the good and the bad things in his life, his dreams, and he's fears and he created one of the most influential stories of all. A place and a Kingdom of Dreams.

For this, and for so much more... Thank you, Mr. Baum

[Kristine L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lukewarm-ish biography about "the man behind the curtain" of the Oz books. Thoroughly documented and meticulously researched, but badly overwritten in places to the point of tedium. .

The first few chapters are a semi-coherent mishmash of infant mortality, dead cousins, the Civil War, Spiritism, Old World fairy tales, and failed family business ventures. These all factor into Baum's storytelling. But the author spends a disproportionately large amount of time in these woods, frequently repeating herself and/or circling back to ground previously covered. Talk about redundant. And dull as a box of rocks.

Additionally, the author seems over-eager to unload her truckload of research. So instead of picking and choosing what's relevant and what's not, she dumps the whole load on the reader and squashes them flat. Does anyone really care how the horse barn at Rose Lawn was appointed?

I had high hopes for this book. But so much of it is just plain boring. It's a snoozefest. I had to force myself to finish this thing. There's also too much guesswork by the author on Baum's early years and she has a tendency to draw conclusions that seem flimsy or forced.

A well-researched but rather tedious biog.

[Jason Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am certainly not an original Wizard of Oz fan, nor am I routinely drawn to biographies of authors and their cultural, historical, financial, and life sequence of events that led them towards particular writing styles. Nevertheless, this book surprised me how well crafted it was. The author created a framework of support allowing the reader insight into the spiritual, economic, and sequence of life events that enabled Mr. Baum to write the Wizard of Oz books and other stories. The author connects these items individually and holistically and points out specifically how they influenced Mr. Baum’s writing. I think the author strikes the right balance between guiding the reader through the series of connections and not belittling the reader by over emphasizing certain aspects of Mr Baum’s life. I found particularly intriguing the early and mid-18th century belief in ghosts and the spirit world as well as the unfortunate frequency of death (especially early childhood death) into the otherworldly aspect of Mr Baum’s creations. Having personally traveled to many areas mentioned in the Midwest also gives enjoyment thinking how Mr Baum and his wife’s financial struggles in Kansas and the Dakotas helped create the background and spark for his stories.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Real Wizard of Oz is the story of the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. He was always trying a new, outlandish business venture---a store full of exotic knick-knacks in the 1890 South Dakota...a touring acting company...an early film production company---and his businesses always failed. Then he created The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and a franchise was born.

Quotes from the book:

“It would become a painful truth that when Baum stopped trying so hard, success came to him.”

“He (Baum) couldn’t have written such a wise story so full of complex ideas as well as simple ones if he hadn’t suffered and strived for so many years…His experiences as a child and as a man, his extensive reading through which he’d absorbed the oldest archetypes from folktales, had all jumbled together in his mind to make a brilliant cocktail, which surfaced intuitively as this brilliant, hyperreal story.”

"In the middle of writing a story, Baum sometimes fell into black moods. He would complain to Maud that 'my characters just won't do what I want them to.' He learned that in order to finish a story, he had to let go and stop trying to force his characters to obey him; if he just let them do as they pleased, they would find their story themselves."

[Phil Wujek · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author, Rebecca Loncraine, really puts the reader alongside L. Frank Baum! I of course knew who he was, and that he wrote "The Wizard of Oz," but this book is a real eye opener! My wife knew I was enthralled with it since every time I put the book down I told her some new insight about the life and times of LFB. One fact that I did not know is that there were fourteen books written by LFB about Oz! When you look at all the books he wrote, either under his own name or aliases, it is mind boggling. The research, well documented, gives credence to this work. what makes it all the more amazing is that this book was written by an Englishwoman. To quote from the back cover flap, "Born in England and raised on a hill farm in Wales, Rebecca Loncraine holds a doctorate in literature from Oxford University and writes regularly for the British press, including "The Independent," the "Guardian," and the "Times Literary Supplement." Also a creative writing teacher, she divides her time between Oxford and London." Assuming that her photo is recent, she certainly has a running start as a well known author!

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book after listening to Finding Dorothy, as it was one of the books listed at the end of that one. I really liked it, although as in many non-fiction books some of it is a little plodding.

I won't write a summary. Why do people feel the need to write an entire synopsis of the plot of a book when they write a review? Isn't that what the book description is for? I want to know what you think of it! These are probably the same people who write the whole origin story of why they make a certain recipe that you have to scroll through before you get to the actual recipe. Oh well, live and let live.

Anyway, if you like the Oz books and/or movie, are interested in the life story of an author, or enjoy reading historical non-fiction, I recommend you read this book. I took off a star because some of it was kind of confusingly out of order, and some of the wording seemed a little awkward when describing historical events.

[Earth&Silver · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit slow-paced at times but bedazzled with many interesting tidbits for the curious.

Baum seems to have been a very complicated man, full of a mix of idealism and at times disappointing elements of the prejudice of his times.

I was particularly drawn to how he viewed his storytelling almost as channeling stories that existed outside himself, as this feeling seems achingly familiar to me. When I was writing more frequently myself my best story ideas always felt like they had contacted me and I was just putting the pre-existing pieces together.

I think the author may be stretching things a bit at times with some of her beliefs about his creative influences, but nonetheless it was neat to see a number of his possible inspirations explained, as well as the behind-the-scenes on what we know of his writing process.