L. Frank Baum | 1856-1919 L. Frank Baum's first attempts at finding a publisher for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) were fruitless: The market for British fairy tales was considerably stronger at the time, and the fantasy land he had created -- with its roots in the American Midwest -- was a hard sell. This rejection occurred even after Baum and his illustrator, W.W. Denslow, had produced the best-selling children's book of 1899, a collection of humorous verse entitled Father Goose, His Book. Eventually Baum did find a publisher, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an immediate success, spawning a stage play in 1902, 13 sequels between 1900 and his death in 1919, a series of Sunday comic pages, a young readers' series of Oz books -- and, of course, the classic film of 1939. Success of this magnitude was without precedent in Baum's life: During his adult life, he had relocated from New York to South Dakota to Chicago, working in and starting a number of businesses, each of which fizzled. But with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz he hit upon a winning formula: A child hero leaves home through some accident and finds herself in a fantasy land, where she is guided by a wise parent-surrogate. This formula is not wholly dissimilar from that of the adventure story for boys that was so popular at the turn of the century, so it is perhaps not surprising that in addition to the Oz industry Baum fathered, he also wrote more than 30 adventure stories between 1906 and 1919. Under the pseudonym Edith Van Dyne, Baum wrote the Aunt Jane's Nieces series, which proved to be as popular at the time as the Oz books were. Under male pseudonyms, Baum wrote adventures by sea and land for boys; under female pseudonyms, Baum wrote stories for girls that moved them into unfamiliar domestic settings, surely adventures of a sort. But under his own name, Baum transcended gender in the appeal he made to child (and adult) devotées of magical fantasy.