Once again Baum had written the bestselling children’s book of the year.Īlthough Baum did not attain a full-time career as a writer until 1897, he quickly made up for lost time. Denslow, whose boldly imaginative illustrations and page design created a sea change in the aesthetics of juvenile titles. Wizard showcased Baum’s text, telling a straightforwardly entertaining tale that dispensed with moralizing and featured a strong female protagonist in the form of Dorothy, alongside the illustrations of W. Baum’s career as a children’s author began with Mother Goose in Prose in 1897 two years later, Father Goose: His Book became the top-selling juvenile publication of 1899.Ĭhicago’s burgeoning combination of concentrated graphic design talent and new achievements in publishing technology helped to produce The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But it was Baum’s mother-in-law who encouraged him to write down the marvelous stories he told his four sons-Frank, Robert, Harry, and Kenneth-and the neighborhood children. Then the paradigm-shifting World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 drew Baum to Chicago, where he pursued a journalism career.
The promise of the American West attracted Baum to the Dakota Territory in 1890, where he made ill-fated attempts to run a retail establishment and a local paper in the town of Aberdeen. In 1882 he married Maud Gage, the independent-minded daughter of the prominent suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage.
Dorothy and the other powerful female characters created by Baum were doubtless influenced by the strong women in his life. Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York, and spent his young life in the East. Frank Baum’s life also paralleled the development of the country in which he lived. Before achieving literary immortality at age forty-four with the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he had been a reporter, a printer, an actor, a poultry breeder, an editor, a theater manager, a playwright, the proprietor of a frontier general store and newspaper, a traveling salesman, a short-story writer, and a pioneer in the field of commercial window displays.