In his 20s, he raised chickens, wrote plays, ran a theater company, and started a business that produced oil-based lubricants. Baum was a natural entertainer, and so his stint as a playwright and actor brought him the greatest satisfaction out of these early employments, but the work was not steady, and the lifestyle disruptive.
By , Baum had reason to desire a more settled life. On one occasion, Maud threw a fit over a box of doughnuts that Frank brought home without consulting her. She was the one who decided what food entered the house. If he was going to buy frivolous things, he would have to make sure that they did not go to waste. By the fourth day, unable to face the moldy confections, Baum buried them in the backyard.
Maud promptly dug them up and presented them to her husband. He promised that he would never again buy food without consulting her and was spared from having to eat the dirt-covered pastries. On a trip to visit his brother-in-law in South Dakota, Frank decided that real opportunity lay in the wind-swept, barren landscape of the Midwest.
He moved his family to Aberdeen and started upon a new series of careers that would just barely keep the Baum family—there were several sons by this time—out of poverty.
Over the next ten years, Frank would run a bazaar, start a baseball club, report for a frontier newspaper and buy dishware for a department store. At age 40, Frank finally threw himself into writing.
In the spring of , on scraps of ragged paper, the story of The Wizard of Oz took shape. The story of Dorothy's quest to find her way home, accompanied by a tin woodsman, a scarecrow and cowardly lion, proved to be quite popular.
Baum wrote about his intentions in the book's introduction: " The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out. Two years later, Baum transformed his fairy tale into a successful Broadway musical.
He re-imagined a popular culture figure around this time with The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus In addition to his Oz books, Baum wrote more children's titles under an array of pseudonyms.
In , Baum moved his family to Hollywood, California, where he worked to bring his stories to the big screen. The first movie versions of his Oz tales were made as short films. In declining health, Baum underwent gall bladder surgery in He spent the last year of his life confined in bed, never fully recovering from the operation.
Just days before his birthday, Baum died on May 6, , at his home in Hollywood, California. Glinda of Oz was the last title he wrote for the Oz series. While the nation mourned this great storyteller, Baum's characters lived on.
Several other authors, including Ruth Plumly Thompson, were hired to continue to create new Oz adventures. Twenty years after his death, a new film version of his classic tale appeared on the big screen. The Wizard of Oz went on to become one of the most-watched movies in cinematic history.
Baum's stories continue to fascinate and enchant to this day. Baum gave up acting when Maud became pregnant with their first child and all the scenery, props, and costumes for The Maid of Arran were destroyed in a fire. He worked for a time in the family oil business in Syracuse, still writing plays in his spare time, none of which were produced. In the late s he and the family, which now included two sons, moved to the Dakota Territory, where Baum worked for a time as a shopkeeper and then as a newspaper editor, enjoying both jobs but failing financially in each.
By it was clear that his growing family, now with four sons, required that he find a job that would provide financial stability. They moved to Chicago, where he was first a newspaper reporter but soon took a better paying job as a traveling salesman with a crockery firm.
At the suggestion of his mother-in-law, Baum began to write down some of the stories he made up to tell his sons every evening when he was home.
One of these stories, Mother Goose in Prose, was published in The book sold well, and, on the advice of his doctor, Baum gave up his traveling job. Instead, he became the editor of a journal for window-dressers, which also did well.
Baum next decided to collaborate on a children's book with a friend, the artist W. Father Goose, His Book, published in , was a best-seller. One of the five books he published in , also based on stories he had told his sons and illustrated by Denslow, was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which immediately broke records for sales and made Baum a celebrity.
At the suggestion of his publisher, Baum's book, with substantial changes to fit the theatrical tastes of the day, was made into a musical in , which also was a great success and toured the United States for years. A second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, a clever satire on the women's suffrage movement, was published in and was very popular, and other Oz books followed, though none matched the originality or sales of the first two books.
In addition, over the next two decades he wrote over 35 non-Oz books under various pseudonyms and aimed at various audiences. Most of these were "pot-boilers, " but they did well financially and helped make Baum a wealthy man. Always looking for new outlets for his creativity, Baum became interested in films. In he founded a company to produce hand-colored slides featuring characters from his Oz books. These were shown while he narrated and an orchestra played background music.
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