L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was an American author who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and thirteen further Oz books, creating one of the best-known fantasy worlds in children's literature.

Lyman Frank Baum was born on 15 May 1856 in Chittenango, New York. Before success as a writer he worked as a theatre producer and playwright, poultry breeder, shopkeeper, newspaper editor and travelling salesman. His first children's book, Mother Goose in Prose, was published in 1897 with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and Father Goose, His Book (1899) was his first collaboration with the illustrator W. W. Denslow.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, illustrated by Denslow, who shared the copyright, was published in 1900 by the George M. Hill Company of Chicago and New York. Its first printing of 10,000 copies had sold out by October 1900. A stage musical opened in Chicago in 1902 and ran on Broadway in 1903. After Hill's firm failed, Bobbs-Merrill reissued the book in 1903 as The New Wizard of Oz. Baum's Oz sequels began with The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and continued to Glinda of Oz, published in 1920 after his death. He also wrote under pen names including Edith Van Dyne and Floyd Akers. He died in Los Angeles on 6 May 1919.

For collectors. The true first edition of the Oz story is the 1900 George M. Hill printing, a copy of which is held by the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division; Bobbs-Merrill copies, including those titled The New Wizard of Oz, are later. In April 2000 the Library of Congress called the book "America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale".