Her name was Maud, and as a college co-ed she had dropped out of Cornell to marry Frank, only to face years of struggle, constantly uprooting their home in search of a better situation. Prone to flights of fancy, he was lucky to have a wife who kept him grounded. Yet it wasn’t in Frank Baum’s nature to get down on himself, and he became newly energized by each of his schemes, determined to “somehow manage to provide for those dependent on me.” He was a sunny man, tall and handsome with a graceful gait and a deep, resonant voice. But the truth was, even that effort wasn’t going so well. If he had never experienced that one special moment that one day in 1898, he might even have gone on to succeed in his current full-time job-and gone down in history as the founder of the National Association of Window Trimmers of America. By then he had failed at so many wildly different pursuits-as a breeder of chickens, as an actor in stage plays, as a purveyor of petroleum products, as an owner of a variety store, as a secretary for a baseball team, as a publisher of a newspaper, as a traveling salesman of fine china - that he might have simply given up on doing anything special with his life. The novel’s name would have to be changed, as Baum soon found out.“The publisher believes that books with jewel names in their titles do not sell well,” he lamented.įrank was 44 by the time the book hit stores in the year 1900, and this business of being an author of children’s stories was still new to him. He sealed the frame and hung it on the wall above the desk in the den of his Chicago home. He fastened it into a frame and surrounded it with a caption: “With this pencil I wrote the ms. By the fall of 1899, the pencil was just a stub. “The story really seemed to write itself,” the author told his publisher.īaum relied on a favorite pencil as he put the tale to paper. A trio of comical characters who join the girl on her quest to a city of emerald controlled by a mysterious wizard. A road of yellow bricks stretching through a dangerous frontier. A mystical land ruled by both good and bad witches. One day in 1898, an unusual sequence of images leaped from one man’s mind: A gray Kansas prairie.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |