BAUM, L(yman) Frank

(1856-1919)

   US writer of children's stories, who wrote also as Floyd Akers, Laura Bancroft, John Estes Cooke, Hugh Fitzgerald, Schuyler Staunton and Edith Van Dyne. He remains famous for his long series of tales set in the land of Oz, beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900; vt The New Wizard of Oz 1903), which served as the main source for the famous film version of 1939. The series continues with: Ozma of Oz (1907; vt Princess Ozma of Oz 1942 UK);The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904; vt The Land of Oz 1914); Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908); The Road to Oz (1909); The Emerald City of Oz (1910); The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913); The Scarecrow of Oz (1915); Rinkitink in Oz (1916); The Lost Princess of Oz (1917); The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), the eponymous lumberjack of which is not a robot; The Magic of Oz (1919); Glinda of Oz (1920); later titles were from other hands. Ozma of Oz includes the first appearance of Tik-Tok, an intelligent clockwork man, one of the first ROBOTS in fiction; the tale was reworked as The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, a 1913 musical play, itself then rewritten as the novel Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), which features a TRANSPORTATION tube through the Earth. LFB's juvenile sf novel The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale Founded on the Mysteries of Electricity and the Optimism of its Devotees. It was Written for Boys, but Others May Read It (1901), is an EDISONADE described rather fully by its title; the child tinkerer-hero, though his electrical gun and ANTIGRAVITY device are supplied magically, finds scientific explanations for everything he experiences. A story in American Fairy Tales (coll 1901; rev with 3 more stories 1908) describes the freezing of time in a US city. Some of LFB's other work, which was produced very rapidly (only a sample is listed below), was fantasy. Among a wide range of authors influenced by LFB, recent examples include Gene WOLFE in "The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976) and Free Live Free (1984), and Geoff RYMAN, whose non-fantastic novel "Was . . ." (1992; vt Was 1992 US), partly set in 19th-century Kansas, constitutes a thorough examination of the roots of Oz.

   JC

   Other works: A New Wonderland (1900; vt The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo 1903); The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902); John Dough and the Cherub (1906); The Sea Fairies (1911) and its sequel Sky Island (1912); The Purple Dragon and Other Fantasies (1897-1905 various mags; coll 1976); Animal Fairy Tales (1905 The Delineator; coll 1989).

   About the author: Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (1957) by Martin GARDNER and R.B. Nye; The Oz Scrapbook (1977) by David L. Greene and Dick Martin.

   See also: CHILDREN'S SF; DIME-NOVEL SF; MACHINES.