Essay: Lyman Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was born May 15 in the year 1856. He was the seventh son in the family. During his childhood, he wrote several short stories with his younger brother. He hated his first name, Lyman and preferred that people called him Frank, that is why he signs his books with L. Frank Baum. When he was twelve he got send to Peekskill Military Academy but he was anything but happy there and after two years he came back home.
Frank wrote a lot about many things, also his fascination with chicken breeding. In his twenties he met Maud Cage, a radical feminist who he later in 1882 married.
He discovered that he felt at home on the stage, performing and later his father build him a theater in New York. He started writing plays for his theater but al lot of plays where lost in the fire, as well as the theater.
After the fire Baum moved to Dakota with his wife, where he opened his own store. The story got bankrupt, so Baum began to work at the local newspaper and wrote columns. Baum and Maud got four children and moved to Chicago where Baum started working as a journalist for the Evening Post. Because he didn’t earn enough money he also started working as a salesman. When he published Mother Goose in Prose in 1897, it became a great success and because of the success he was able to quit his job as salesman.
In 1900 Baum published his masterpiece ‘The wonderful Wizard of Oz’. Baum became very famous through the book and soon followed the successful musical ‘The Wizard of Oz’ that even made it to Broadway. Baum wrote thirteen sequels of The wonderful Wizard of oz.
Baum stayed in the theater business, financed some other musicals and went bankrupt again with the production of ‘The Fairylogue and Radioplays. He even had to sell the rights of his books, including The Wizard of Oz, to pay his debts. When they moved to Hollywood in 1914, he started his own movie company ‘The Oz Film Manufacturing Company’. However, this didn’t last long before it got bankrupt to.
Because of his failures in his movie company, his stress became too much for him and fell into a coma by a stroke.