L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, New York, the son of a businessman who grew rich in the oil industry, and he grew up on the family estate. He was a sickly child who loved to read. As a young man he raised fancy chickens, ran a printing press, and wrote and acted in plays. In 1882 he married Maud Gage, the daughter of the women's rights campaigner Matilda Joslyn Gage. The family moved to Aberdeen, in Dakota Territory, where he ran a store and edited a newspaper, and then to Chicago, where he worked as a reporter and a traveling salesman and founded a magazine for window dressers. His first children's book, Mother Goose in Prose, appeared in 1897. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), illustrated by W. W. Denslow, tells of Dorothy, a girl from Kansas who is carried by a cyclone to the magical land of Oz. It was a great success, and Baum wrote thirteen sequels and many other books, some under pen names. He moved to Hollywood and died there in 1919.

L. Frank Baum is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born into a devout Methodist family; he later joined the Episcopal Church and became a member of the Theosophical Society. Source: Wikipedia