Yet Baum could never stay away from the stage long. In 1880 he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record, and in 1886, when Baum was 30 years old, his first book was published: The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs. He specialized in raising a particular breed of fowl, the Hamburg chicken. Disillusioned, Baum left the theatre-temporarily-and went to work as a clerk in his brother-in-law's dry goods company in Syracuse.Īt the age of 20, Baum took on a new vocation: the breeding of fancy poultry, which was a national craze at the time. His first such failure occurred at age 18, when a local theatrical company duped him into replenishing their stock of costumes, with the promise of leading roles that never came his way.

By the time he was 17, Baum had established a second amateur journal, The Stamp Collector, printed an 11-page pamphlet called Baum's Complete Stamp Dealers' Directory, and started a stamp dealership with his friends.Īt about the same time Frank embarked upon his lifetime infatuation with theater and the performing arts, a devotion which would repeatedly lead him to failure and near-bankruptcy. The brothers published several issues of the journal and were even able to sell ads. His father bought him a cheap printing press, and Frank used it to produce The Rose Lawn Home Journal with the help of his younger brother, Harry Clay Baum, with whom he had always been close. But after two utterly miserable years at the military academy, following an incident described as a heart attack, he was allowed to return home.įrank started writing at an early age, perhaps due to an early fascination with printing. Frank was a sickly child given to daydreaming, and his parents may have thought he needed toughening up. As a young child Frank was tutored at home with his siblings, but at the age of 12 he was sent to study at Peekskill Military Academy. Frank grew up on his parents' expansive estate, Rose Lawn, which he always remembered fondly as a sort of paradise. His mother, Cynthia Stanton, was a direct descendant of Thomas Stanton, one of the four Founders of what is now Stonington, Connecticut.īenjamin Baum was a wealthy businessman, who had made his fortune in the oil fields of Pennsylvania.

He was named 'Lyman' after his father's brother, but always disliked this name, and preferred to go by 'Frank'. Denslow, of one of the most popular books ever written in American children's literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.įrank was born in Chittenango, New York, into a Protestant family of German origin, the seventh of nine children born to Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Baum, only five of whom survived into adulthood. Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856- May 6, 1919) was an American author, philatelist, and the creator, along with illustrator W.

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