Baum, L. Frank (1856-1919)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

L. (Lyman) Frank Baum was born on 15 May 1856 in Chittenango, New York and died on 6 May 1919 in Los Angeles, California. He is best known as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its numerous sequels. Baum worked in theater and newspapers, as well as various entrepreneurial projects before his prolific career as a writer of children's literature. Publishing under various pseudonyms, as well as his real name, Baum produced more than 50 novels in addition to short stories, poems, and theatrical scripts. While there is no explicit evidence that Baum was vegan or vegetarian, the character of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz series, is presented as veg*n. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), Baum creates a community of vegetable people who live in the underground "Land of the Mangaboos" and refer to people who live on the surface as the "meat people." 

This facet of Baum's writing has been interpreted by Sally Roesch Wagner as a reflection of the influence of the vegetarian, Abolitionist, feminist, and suffragist values of his activist mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who lived with the family during their time in South Dakota.

IMAGE: L. Frank Baum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

PUBLICATIONS