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    The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum
    The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum
    The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum

    Written by Rebecca Loncraine

    Narrated by Brooke Heldman

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A captivating biography of the eccentric author, filmmaker, and innovator, L. Frank Baum

    Enchanting generations of fans, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900, was written by a man whose life was nearly as adventurous as his heroine Dorothy's legendary trip. Ambitious and always drawn to the unconventional, L. Frank Baum was not just the author of more than sixty books; he was at the forefront of moving picture technology and championed women's rights. A unique celebration of Baum's life, The Real Wizard of Oz explores the eventful times in which Baum lived (1856-1919), which influenced nearly every aspect of the Oz tales - from the Civil War to Hollywood (which was emerging as a mecca for creative hopefuls) to the gulf between America's heartland, with its tornado alleys and its cities teeming with "Tin Man" factory workers.

    Baum, who died in 1919, two decades before MGM re-created his vision in eye-popping Technicolor, was a remarkable entrepreneur. He also developed the story for Broadway and created The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, convinced that he had found the perfect medium for children's stories - an audacious idea that made him a laughingstock among film distributors. Capturing the origins of an enterprise that continues to reach lucrative new heights - most recently with the smash success of Wicked - this audio book is a lively tour of a fascinating era and its most intriguing storyteller.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOasis Audio
    Release dateJun 3, 2014
    ISBN9781621884057
    The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum
    Author

    Rebecca Loncraine

    Rebecca Loncraine was a British freelance writer. She held a foundation diploma in Fine Art, a first class undergraduate degree in history, and a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University. She is the author of The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum published by Gotham Books in 2009. Born in England, she grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of Wales, and it was there she returned after her diagnosis of breast cancer. It is also where - after her recovery - she fell in love with glider flying. Rebecca began writing Skybound in response to her new passion and she was just finishing the new book when, in 2015, she became ill again. Rebecca died at home in Wales in September 2016.

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    Reviews for The Real Wizard of Oz

    4.5/5

    17 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919) had wild success with his Wizard of Oz books, but was spectacularly unsuccessful in just about everything else -- except in selecting a wife. If it hadn’t been for his wife Maud’s inheritance from her mother, he and his family might have been homeless. And his success at writing didn’t come early in his life. He was an actor, a store-owner, a newspaper editor and movie entrepreneur. He lived at various times in New York State, the Dakota territory (brrrrrrrrrrr!), Chicago and Hollywood, California. He went bankrupt once and eventually had to assign his Oz royalties to the friend who assumed his debt. Rebecca Loncraine tells the story of the man who wrote what is arguably the first true blockbuster American fairy tale – his Wizard books were the Harry Potter phenomena of their day. Through all his troubles, he comes through as a likable man who lived through difficult times and did it his way.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is the biography of Wizard of Oz creator, L. Frank Baum. I very much enjoyed this book. I found Baum’s life extremely thought-provoking and as I read the book I found that I was routing him on! The book is enhanced by eight pages of photos (I wish there were more) that added a personal glimpse into Baum’s biography. I have read that some of the book’s other reviewers did not like how much of the book was devoted to what was happening around Baum, i.e. thoughts and customs of the time in which he lived. But I found this added information very relevant to the biography. For example, if you read a story about a boy that wanted to explore the universe, it would be very important to know if they grew up in the 1930s-40s dreaming of being a spaceman like Flash and Buck, or in the 1960s-70s dreaming of being an astronaut like Neil and Buzz. Likewise, L. Frank Baum grew up in a time that greatly affected his stories. I think the author used the proper mix of personal story and American history to form the perfect blend!
    • 4/5
      A few books have been written on L. Frank Baum in the past. Most of them assume some familiarity with his life and work, with the authors perhaps recognizing that much of their reading audience will be "Oz fans." This book is the first I've seen in the celebrity biography vein, attempting to appeal to the casual reader by couching Baum's life in his culture and times. That it is a populist book is pretty much apparent from the cover: it's designed to catch your eye and tweak some familiarity with the imagery and typeface you find on other "Wizard of Oz"-oriented merchandise.The problem with a project like this, to a large degree, is that Baum's life isn't all that remarkable. It's certainly in no way sensational. There is no potential scandal attached to Baum, unlike Lewis Carroll or Hans Christian Andersen; he didn't have any nebulous health issues, he wasn't gay, and he never secluded himself from the public. He was a natural-born storyteller, a bit of a dreamer, and he was terrible with money. That's...pretty much it. As a result, Rebecca Loncraine doesn't have any marketable crises or issues around which to revolve her 300-page book, so she makes up for it by skewing her material in two different ways. Both of them are treading on thin ice. The first zeros in on Baum's sometimes contradictory but generally progressive ideas, emphasizing the one aspect that people today might find extraordinary: theosophism. As an adult Baum was a theosophist, somewhere between agnostic and New Ager, who believed in elemental spirits, a non-specific God who could be found in every living thing, and elements of reincarnation. That's a fascinating subject, and I'm glad Loncraine chose to explain theosophism out and offer some insight into Baum's spiritual mindset. However, from the very outset of the book, she places her story in the context of spiritualism. She starts the book not with Baum's family, but the Fox sisters, who claimed to be mediums. Baum probably never had any contact with them and may not have given them more thought than most people give a movie star. Yet Loncraine insists on emphasizing every childhood death in his family, every evidence that he or his wife or his mother-in-law were interested in seances or mediums, with the implication that it inspired him (or haunted him) to create fantasy stories. I've just never seen any evidence that L. Frank Baum was any more or less interested in spirits than any other man of the early 1900s - when spiritualism was basically a craze - and more to the point, Loncraine never provides that evidence herself. Almost everything she posits is broad and hypothetical. Yes, it could be that Baum directed an interest in spirits or a fear of child death into his stories. It might also be that he just had a really big and active imagination.At very least, the spiritualism stuff is interesting, if tangential. Loncraine's second hobby horse is markedly less original. She is very, very interested in trying to find "the inspiration" for "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," something many people have tried and failed to do. Loncraine leaves no potential yellow brick unturned, suggesting that the low-budget opulence of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired the sham of "Wizard"'s Emerald City, that a childhood dream became the Scarecrow, and that Civil War amputees became the Tin Woodman. It's all possible, of course, but Loncraine doesn't offer any quotes to add plausibility to her argument: she just throws these theories out there for readers to take at face value. Similarly, she makes all sorts of assumptions about Baum's mindset and mood in general; at one point, she names "two" major deaths in Baum's world in 1898. One is his mother-and-law, which makes perfect sense, and the other...is Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, whom Baum never met. Lewis Carroll, who has only featured in two prior paragraphs in the book. Lewis Carroll, who is only mentioned in Baum's own words in the most generally respectful of terms. Okay, so Baum read Carroll. Was he necessarily one of his heroes? Would he have greeted news of his death with anything more than, "That's too bad"? We don't know. We are given no evidence one way or another in this book.I have now spent a lot of time harping on Loncraine's biography, but I feel forced to do so because her tangents are so terribly, terribly distracting. I can't decide if the book was written quickly or just edited very poorly, but either way, it's a frustrating read. As soon as you get engrossed in a good, objective section, you get pulled out by a strong dose of authorial influence and pushed in a direction it may not make sense to go. I'm glad I read "The Real Wizard of Oz," but I really do wish the author had chosen to treat her subject with a lighter hand. Not every man lives a sensationalized life, and not every molehill need be made into a mountain.
    • 4/5
      An enjoyable reading of the life and times of America's first writer of fairy tales. I found Ms. Loncraine work to be most comprehensive as she analyzed Baum's life within the context of his times and then connected suggested influences to his volume of work. The only real stick I have (a very small one) is she does seem to stretch a bit when matching influences to his written stories. I recommend this work to anyone who enjoys fantasy or is interested in the world in the late 1800's or early 1900's.
    • 4/5
      The author of this book does a great job of intertwining what is going on in the world during the time of L. Frank Baum. This is important as the events shaped his mind when he would later write the Wizard of Oz series. It seems as if the author of this book really did her research and I appreciate that. My biggest peeve of the book is that sometimes it begins to sound more like a college dissertation instead of fun, interesting book. But besides that, job well done!
    • 5/5
      An amazingly in-depth look at the creation of an American fairy tale.
    • 4/5
      Interesting book. So many curious coincidences of firsts occur, whether important or not you may judge, but L Frank Baum's first published book Mother Goose Rhymes in Prose, Illustrated by Maxfield Parrish as HIS first published Illustrations in a book and the publisher lived or owned the first house built by Frank Lloyd Wright, then later the Wizard of Oz movie classic I believe was the first to introduce color.

      Interesting tidbits for such a well loved author and story and I think I have seen the 1897 true first edition printed online for as much as $10,000 in the past.

      There is more in this book than this but that caught my attention.