Peep Behind the Curtain

Readers rarely get a chance to peep behind the curtain of a book and look into what went into the writing of it. You will find information here about why I wanted to write this book and how I went about it.

I've been fascinated by The Wizard of Oz since I was a child.

In my memory there isn’t a time before The Wizard of Oz. I still have my battered old copy of the book, which is illustrated with peculiar and haunting pictures. They are imprinted on my mind. When I flick through them now, as I did so often as a child, it is as though the delicate pictures are a map, a path back to childhood itself. I can’t remember a time before I had seen the MGM film, The Wizard of Oz, either. Frank Baum’s original story and the Technicolor movie are braided together in my memory, like Dorothy’s long red hair. It is as though each tells the same story but from slightly different angles, two overlapping perspectives.

In my biography of Baum I ask, where did The Wizard of Oz come from?

Why did I want to write about Baum and The Wizard of Oz?

Oz and Me

L. Frank Baum

	L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) is the author of a substantial body of modern folk tales, including The Wizard of Oz (1900). He wrote 13 sequels to his first Oz story, as well as numerous other fairytales. He traveled across the USA throughout his life; he lived in New York, South Dakota, Chicago and Hollywood. He lived through an era of enormous change. His endeavours in literature, cinema, journalism, advertising and political radicalism, provide a unique history of some of the major transformations taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. He was fascinated and disturbed by these changes: the development of mass production, the high infant mortality rate, the Women’s Suffrage movement, the emergence of psychoanalysis and ethnography, and the birth of cinema.

"In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy Tales should be respected." Charles Dickens

This biography is also about the history of fairy tales: the folk collections of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and the weird world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Baum looked to this European folk tale tradition. His aim was to create in his writing a distinctly American version of these powerful stories.

The questions that underlie this biography are:
• Where do stories come from?
• What are fairy tales?
• Why do we like to be frightened by stories?
• Are fairy tales really for children?

	The Oak Grove of Baum's Childhood

A great deal of travel and research has gone in to the writing of my biography of L. Frank Baum. This work was a journey of its own, and took me to upstate New York, Chicago, Tornado Alley and the Great Plains.

Like a detective, I searched for clues in Baum’s life to help me to understand where his stories came from (14 Oz books and 50 or so other stories). In addition to the facts and events of his life, I asked unusual questions about him, looking for answers in things on the periphery of his vision. I looked into:

• How the landscapes that surrounded him through his life - the forests of the Finger Lakes, the dusty plains of South Dakota, the urban energy of Chicago, the orange groves of California - shaped his writing.
• Baum liked to write outdoors and I wanted to know how this affected his tales, most of which take place outside. Architectural spaces are often interiors for tricksters and hidden dangers.

Baum Writing Outdoors

• Modern magic moved into machines for Baum. He was fascinated by new inventions and by electricity but he was also anxious about their impact on human beings.
• Baum believed in reincarnation, in ghosts and in spirit mediumship. He saw himself as a medium for modern fairy tales.