"Finding Oz:" The life of Dorothy's creator

"Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story"

by Evan Schwartz

Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, 400 pp., $27

"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was America's first big fantasy story for kids. The prose lacks the dazzle of the 1939 movie, but in 1900 the lavishly illustrated book was a best-seller — the first of many Oz tales that were the Harry Potter books of their day.

In "Finding Oz," Evan Schwartz, a former editor at Business Week, undertakes to explain Oz through the life of its creator, L. Frank Baum. Much of what he says is fascinating, but not all of it is convincing.

Baum was a flighty man. He had run a variety store, edited a weekly paper, bred chickens, acted in plays and sold crockery and cans of lubricating oil. He'd make a go of it, then fizzle out.

Then Oz. It was a delight: the bad and the good witches, the wizard who was a humbug, the brainless scarecrow with most of the smarts. There was fun in it, and satire. Also wisdom. How had Baum come up with it?

Some was clear enough. The way to the military academy Baum attended as a boy in New York State was on a yellow brick road. The Emerald City was from the buildings at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which people called the White City. The wizard with an image on a screen was from Thomas Edison, who demonstrated moving pictures at the Chicago fair; the humbug part was from P.T. Barnum.

The idea for a separate world, writes Schwartz, probably came from Theosophy, a New Age doctrine that counted Baum and his wife as believers. Theosophy's priestess, Madame Blavatsky, called her other world the astral plane; Baum called his Oz. Blavatsky wrote of "the Eternity of the Universe in toto." Baum named his protagonist's little dog Toto.

Schwartz finds many connections like that.

The strongest character in Schwartz's account is Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda Gage. Gage was a colleague of feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony but more radical than they: on the day the Statue of Liberty was unveiled, Gage took part in a public protest saying Lady Liberty was a "gigantic lie." She wrote a book slamming the Christian church for having backed the persecution of witches, which was the domination of women by men. For all that, Gage was sometimes denounced as witchlike herself.

Baum's fantasy world would have four witches — and he made two of them good. One was Glinda, a name Schwartz guesses was from "the Good Witch Matilda."

The book has many such guesses. The Scarecrow, Schwartz says, was "partly inspired by the brainless populists" and the Tin Woodman represented "the heartless industrial workers," neither of which would support women's right to vote. Maybe this is so, but it is quite a structure to erect on a simple story for kids. Nor is it the only one: circulating on the Internet is another interpretation, which Schwartz rightly rejects, that the golden bricks and the silver slippers represented the political battle over the gold standard in 1896, with "Oz" derived from "ounce."

Baum was not a social prophet writing in code. He was a man trying to support his family by writing a book for kids. He said in 1905 that he had thought up the name "Oz" while looking at filing cabinets labeled, "A-G," "H-N," and "O-Z." Schwartz dismisses this as apocryphal and muses instead on Z symbolizing "the great zigzag of life" and O the "eternal circle of life." The reader may prefer the simpler story.

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle Times editorial writer.