The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum [VINTAGE 2009] [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Fine unread condition beige boards, brown spine, and gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Family Tree; Introduction: On Telling the Life Story of a Storyteller; Preliminary Page Quotes by Walt Whitman, L. Frank Baum and Black Elk; Acknowledgments; Notes on Sources; A Selected Bibliography of Works by L. Frank Baum; Selected Bibliography; Index and About the Author. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates. "In the first major literary biography of L. Frank Baum, Rebecca Loncraine tells the story of Oz as you've never heard it, with a look behind the curtain at the vivid life and eccentric imagination of its creator. L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899 and it was first published in 1900. A runaway hit, it was soon recognized as America's first modern fairy tale. Buam's life story, like the fictional world he created, is uniquely American, rooted in the transforming historical changes of his times. Baum was a complex and eccentric man who could never stay put for long; his restless creative spirit and voracious appetite for new projects led him across the United States during his lifetime, and he drew energy and inspiration from each new dramatic landscape he encountered. Born in 1856, Baum spent his youth in the Finger Lakes region of New York as amputee soldiers returned from the Civil War; childhood mortality was also commonplace, blurring the lines between the living and the dead, and making room in Baum's young imagination for vividly real ghosts. When Baum was growing up, P.T. Barnum ruled the minds of samll towns and his traveling circus was the most famous act around. Baum married a headstrong young woman named Maud Gage and they ventured out west to Dakota Territory, where they faced violent tornadoes, Ghost Dancing tribes, and desperate droughts, before trading the hardships on the Great Plains for the excitement of Chicago and the fantastical White City of the World's Fair. Baum's writing tapped into an inner world that blurred his own sense of reality and fantasy. The Land of Oz, which Baum believed he had "discovered" rather than invented, grew into something far bigger and more popular than he'd ever imagined. After the roaring success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he became a kind of slave to his creation, trapped inside Oz as his army of demanding child fans kept sending him back there to create new adventures for Dorothy, Toto, and the humbug wizard. He went on to write thirteen sequels to his first Oz book. He also wrote the first Broadway adaptations of his Oz tales and turned his Oz books into some of the first motion pictures in a small and undiscovered rural settlement called "Hollywood." Baum cofounded the Oz Flim Manufacturing Company, even as critics warned that no one would pay to see a children's story. And they were right - his early ventures were box office flops and the world was not ready for Oz on-screen until 1939, when MGM released The Wizard of Oz in brilliant Technicolor. Baum was not around to see it - he'd died in bed in 1919 just weeks after completing his final Oz book. But the book and film alike have become classics, just as well-loved today as they were when they first appeared. The Real Wizard of Oz takes us back to Oz as adults, and shows us the story we grew up with as it's never been seen before." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.…