L. Frank Baum

Titles in Young Readers category:

• Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz    

  The train from 'Frisco was very late. It should have arrived at Hugson's Siding at midnight, but it was already five o'clock and the gray dawn was breaking in the east when the little train slowly rumbled up to the open shed that served for the station-house. As it came to a stop the conducto ...

• Emerald City of Oz, The    

  The Nome King was in an angry mood, and at such times he was very disagreeable. Every one kept away from him, even his Chief Steward Kaliko.

• Enchanted Island of Yew, The

  I am going to tell a story, one of those tales of astonishing adventures that happened years and years and years ago. Perhaps you wonder why it is that so many stories are told of "once on a time", and so few of these days in which we live; but that is easily explained.

• Glinda of Oz    

  Glinda, the good Sorceress of Oz, sat in the grand court of her palace, surrounded by her maids of honor -- a hundred of the most beautiful girls of the Fairyland of Oz. The palace court was built of rare marbles, exquisitely polished. Fountains tinkled musically here and there; the vast colonn ...

• Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The    

  Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it when I was a child. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled limbs; ...

• Lost Princess of Oz, The    

  There could be no doubt of the fact: Princess Ozma, the lovely girl ruler of the Fairyland of Oz, was lost. She had completely disappeared.Not one of her subjects--not even her closest friends--knew what had become of her. It was Dorothy who first discovered it. Dorothy was a little Kansas g ...

• Magic of Oz, The    

  On the east edge of the Land of Oz, in the Munchkin Country, is a big, tall hill called Mount Munch. One one side, the bottom of this hill just touches the Deadly Sandy Desert that separates the Fairyland of Oz from all the rest of the world, but on the other side, the hill touches the beautif ...

• Marvelous Land of Oz, The    

  In the Country of the Gillikins, which is at the North of the Land of Oz, lived a youth called Tip. There was more to his name than that, for old Mombi often declared that his whole name was Tippetarius; but no one was expected to say such a long word when "Tip" would do just as well.

• Mary Louise

  You will like Mary Louise because she is so much like yourself. Mrs. Van Dyne has succeeded in finding a very human girl for her heroine; Mary Louise is really not a fiction character at all. Perhaps you know the author through her "Aunt Jane's Nieces" stories; then you don't need to be t ...

• Ozma of Oz    

  The wind blew hard and joggled the water of the ocean, sending ripples across its surface. Then the wind pushed the edges of the ripples until they became waves, and shoved the waves around until they became billows. The billows rolled dreadfully high: higher even than the tops of houses. So ...

• Patchwork Girl of Oz, The    

  "Where's the butter, Unc Nunkie?" asked Ojo.

  Unc looked out of the window and stroked his long beard. Then he turned to the Munchkin boy and shook his head.

• Rinkitink In Oz    

  If you have a map of the Land of Oz handy, you will find that the great Nonestic Ocean washes the shores of the Kingdom of Rinkitink, between which and the Land of Oz lies a strip of the country of the Nome King and a Sandy Desert. The Kingdom of Rinkitink isn't very big and lies close to the o ...

• Road to Oz, The    

  "Please, miss," said the shaggy man, "can you tell me the road to Butterfield?"

• Scarecrow of Oz, The    

  "Seems to me," said Cap'n Bill, as he sat beside Trot under the big acacia tree, looking out over the blue ocean, "seems to me, Trot, as how the more we know, the more we find we don't know."

• Sea Fairies, The    

  The oceans are big and broad. I believe two-thirds of the earth's surface is covered with water. What people inhabit this water has always been a subject of curiosity to the inhabitants of the land. Strange creatures come from the seas at times, and perhaps in the ocean depths are many, m ...

• Tik-Tok of Oz    

  "I won't!" cried Ann; "I won't sweep the floor. It is beneath my dignity."

• Tin Woodman of Oz, The    

  The Tin Woodman sat on his glittering tin throne in the handsome tin hall of his splendid tin castle in the Winkie Country of the Land of Oz. Beside him, in a chair of woven straw, sat his best friend, the Scarecrow of Oz. At times they spoke to one another of curious things they had seen and s ...

• Wizard of Oz, The    

  Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and thi ...

Titles in Short Stories category:

• Box of Robbers, The

  No one intended to leave Martha alone that afternoon, but it happened that everyone was called away, for one reason or another. Mrs. McFarland was attending the weekly card party held by the Women's Anti-Gambling League. Sister Nell's young man had called quite unexpectedly to take her fo ...

• Capture of Father Time, The

  Jim was the son of a cowboy, and lived on the broad plains of Arizona. His father had trained him to lasso a bronco or a young bull with perfect accuracy, and had Jim possessed the strength to back up his skill he would have been as good a cowboy as any in all Arizona.

• Dummy That Lived, The

  In all Fairyland there is no more mischievous a person than Tanko-Mankie the Yellow Ryl. He flew through the city one afternoon--quite invisible to moral eyes, but seeing everything himself--and noticed a figure of a wax lady standing behind the big plate glass window of Mr. Floman's depa ...

• Enchanted Types, The

  One time a knook became tired of his beautiful life and longed for something new to do. The knooks have more wonderful powers than any other immortal folk--except, perhaps, the fairies and ryls. So one would suppose that a knook who might gain anything he desired by a simple wish could no ...

• Girl Who Owned a Bear, The

  Mamma had gone down-town to shop. She had asked Nora to look after Jane Gladys, and Nora promised she would. But it was her afternoon for polishing the silver, so she stayed in the pantry and left Jane Gladys to amuse herself alone in the big sitting-room upstairs.

• Glass Dog, The    

  An accomplished wizard once lived on the top floor of a tenement house and passed his time in thoughtful study and studious thought. What he didn't know about wizardry was hardly worth knowing, for he possessed all the books and recipes of all the wizards who had lived before him; and, mo ...

• King of the Polar Bears, The

  The King of the Polar Bears lived among the icebergs in the far north country. He was old and monstrous big; he was wise and friendly to all who knew him. His body was thickly covered with long, white hair that glistened like silver under the rays of the midnight sun. His claws were stron ...

• Laughing Hippopotamus, The    

  On one of the upper branches of the Congo river lived an ancient and aristocratic family of hippopotamuses, which boasted a pedigree dating back beyond the days of Noah--beyond the existence of mankind--far into the dim ages when the world was new.

• Magic Bon Bons, The    

  There lived in Boston a wise and ancient chemist by the name of Dr. Daws, who dabbled somewhat in magic. There also lived in Boston a young lady by the name of Claribel Sudds, who was possessed of much money, little wit and an intense desire to go upon the stage.

• Mandarin and the Butterfly, The

  A mandarin once lived in Kiang-ho who was so exceedingly cross and disagreeable that everyone hated him. He snarled and stormed at every person he met and was never known to laugh or be merry under any circumstances. Especially he hated boys and girls; for the boys jeered at him, which ar ...

• Queen of Quok, The

  A king once died, as kings are apt to do, being as liable to shortness of breath as other mortals.

• Wonderful Pump, The

  Not many years ago there lived on a stony, barren New England farm a man and his wife. They were sober, honest people, working hard from early morning until dark to enable them to secure a scanty living from their poor land.

About the Author

American journalist and writer, whose best-known book is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Baum's stories about the imaginary Land of Oz belong to the classics of fantasy literature. The Oz series was long shunned by librarians, and neglected by scholars of children's literature. Baum has often been compared to Lewis Carroll - they both had a girl as a protagonist in their most famous works.

L. Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, as the son of the oil magnate Benjamin Ward Baum and Cynthia (Stanton) Baum, a women's rights activist. He was privately tutored at home and spent two years at Peekskill Military Academy (1868-69).

In 1873 Barrie became a reporter on the New York World. Two years later he founded the New Era weekly in Pennsylvania. He was a poultry farmer with B.W. Baum and Son and edited Poultry Record and wrote columns for New York Farmer and Dairyman. In New York Baum acted as George Brooks with May Roberts and the Sterling Comedy in plays which he had written. He owned an opera house in 1882-83, and toured with his own repertory company. In 1882 he married Maud Gage; they had four sons.

Baum returned in 1883 to Syracuse to the family oil business and worked as a salesman in Baum's Ever-Ready Castorine axle grease. His own endeavor was not successful - Baum's Bazaar general store failed in South Dakota, and from 1888 to 1890 he ran the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. He moved to Chicago, and tried sales positions. In 1897 he founded National Association of Window Trimmers and edited Show Window from 1897 to 1902.

Baum made his debut as a novelist with Mother Goose in Prose (1897). It was based on stories told to his own children. Its last chapter introduced the farm-girl Dorothy. In 1899 appeared Father Goose: His Book, which quickly became a best-seller. Baum's next work was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a story of little Dorothy from Kansas who is transported by a 'twister' to a magical realm. The book, which was illustrated and decorated by W.W. Denslow, was published at Baum's own expense.

The first of the Oz books was made into a musical in 1901. Since its appearance the story has been filmed many times. Other novels in the series were The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908), The Road to Oz (1909), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), Glinda of Oz (1920), and The Visitors from Oz, which was adapted from a comic strip by Baum and appeared in 1960. Baum's former illustrator W.W. Denslow produced stories with Oz characters in the early 1900s. In 1914-15 Baum was the founding director of Oz Film Manufacturing Company (later Dramatic Features Company) in Los Angeles.

During his career Baum wrote more than 60 books, some of them for adults, including The Last Egyptian (1908). He gathered material for works aimed at teenagers during his motoring tours across the country and travels in Europe and Egypt.

Born with a congenitally weak heart, Baum was ill through much of his life. He died on May 6, 1919, in Hollywood, where he had moved to a house he called Ozcot. The Oz series was continued by other writers, among them Ruth Plumly Thompson and Baum's great-grand son Roger Baum.

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.