Synopsis
Explore a little-known but influential period in the life of children's author L. Frank Baum and sample his baseball poems, newspaper editorials, and animal fairy tales.
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From the Publisher
Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years explores a little-known but influential period in the life of children's author L. Frank Baum and highlights a sampling of his baseball poems, newspaper editorials, and animal fairy tales.
A clever promoter, L. Frank Baum dispensed humor along with the merchandise at Baum's Bazaar in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory. He also operated behind the scenes, much like the man behind the screen in his Wizard of Oz, to boost the town's baseball team on its way to the 1889 Dakota Territory championship. As editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, Baum offered controversial opinions on various topics-woman suffrage, spiritualism and the occult, tolerance, contentment, and deceptive trade practices-that thread through his Oz books. In his later animal fairy tales, the author exhibited a keen appreciation for his prairie experiences, using gophers, bison, and other creatures as characters. Instead of the material prosperity he expected to find in Dakota, Baum gained a rich lode of experience and insight that helped him along the road to his career as a successful children's author.
Nancy Tystad Koupal is editor/annotator of L. Frank Baum's Our Landlady (Nebraska, 1996), a collection of satirical columns that Baum wrote for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer.
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