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The
first tornado caught on camera |
I am writing a biography of L. Frank Baum, author of
The Wizard of Oz
I've been fascinated by this story 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 book I'm asking, where did the story of The
Wizard of Oz come from?
L. Frank Baum
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L.
Frank Baum |
My biography of L. Frank Baum will be published by
Gotham (Penguin USA) in Summer 2009. See News
for details
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.
Why am I writing about The
Wizard of Oz?
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