Frank and Maud married in a simple ceremony held in the Gage’s parlor. Matilda was none too happy about her prospective son-in-law, but an equally strong-willed Maud persisted. While an actor, he met and married Maud Gage, the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a nationally known activist who cofounded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Susan B.

This was the first in a long line of short-lived stints with varying degrees of success-traveling actor, singer, playwright, and axle grease salesman, all bankrolled by his family. At nineteen, a restless Frank left home to ride the wave of a new craze, fancy chicken breeding. But his heart was not in the family oil business. And when that failed, and it often did for Baum, he used those qualities to reinvent himself, again and again.īorn in 1856, Baum enjoyed an idyllic childhood on the outskirts of Syracuse, New York.

Living on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Baum embraced new American ideals of innovation, imagination, and the courage to leave your home for something magical in another land. She just puts one foot in front of another along the Yellow Brick Road to achieve what it is that she needs to do.” And most of what she achieves she achieves without recourse to the magic. “Dorothy really set the stage for little girls getting out of the house and going on adventures the way that boys do.” Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, adds: “Dorothy goes into a land in which magic spells are part of the apparatus of governance. “There is a real American value of being self-reliant, and you see that with Dorothy,” says Dina Massachi in American Oz, a new American Experience documentary airing on PBS on April 19. Baum’s book offered otherworldly adventures firmly rooted in the American landscape: In this case, Kansas, with a plucky, self-reliant girl who doesn’t need a prince to save her, a sunny appreciation of hucksterism, and good witches. The most popular fantasy stories for children came from Europe, such as the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault. They sought to impart moral and religious values.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, books written for children were instructional and sermonizing.

The wonderful wizard of oz 1900