Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years (review)

Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed. Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years. South Dakota History 30.1 (Spring 2000).

"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife" (Baum 7). With this plain, straightforward sentence, L. Frank Baum began a literary journey that would generate a fourteen-book series, produce national fame, help gain and lose and regain a fortune, and elevate Dorothy and his cast of characters to the stature of twentieth-century American icons. The recent anniversary of the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) marks a century of the text's adulation, condemnation, and commodification. Oz, "a distinctly American imaginary world" in Suzanne Rahn's estimation (7), has undergone analysis for its political, commercial, spiritual, archetypal, psychological, and Oedipal layerings. Banned by librarians, beloved by child readers, the Oz series is a significant twentieth-century phenomenon. Repackaged numerous times on Broadway since 1902 and by Hollywood since 1910, Oz remains a story that fascinates and puzzles. Is it subversive or conformist? Is it a spiritual parable or an allegory of commerce? Does it embrace the family or destabilize the home? Is it quintessentially American or does it have roots in an older British tradition? The plethora of recent, provocative scholarship on Baum and Oz, urged on no doubt by the approaching centenary, suggests that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a complex, at times contradictory, fantasy and holds up Baum's text as a rich, contentious site for literary interpretation.

A significant addition to recent Baum scholarship is a special issue of South Dakota History. Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years expands our understanding of the years between 1888 and 1891, when Baum and his family left upstate New York to seek their fortune in the settlement West. These few years of hustle, optimism, and ultimate failure introduced Baum to a landscape in crisis that would become Dorothy's Kansas. Contributing to this issue are editor Nancy Tystad Koupal, Michael Patrick Hearn, and Mark I. West, names well known in the world of Baum scholarship. Hearn's The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973) inspired a surge of new studies; Tystad Koupal's painstaking recreation of Baum's journalistic work, Our Landlady (1996), recovered his early authorial experiments; and West's Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America (1989) has established the literary and cultural context that nurtured Baum's childhood and set the stage for his own journey to Oz. Selected readings from Baum's light verse, editor's columns, and a literary fairy tale round out the issue. Indeed, the judicious blend of Baum, his critics, and well-placed illustrations makes this special issue particularly appealing.

The articles themselves highlight Baum's passions, his conflicts, and his creativity as a club secretary, editor, and children's writer. Hearn and Tystad Koupal give us insight into the pattern of boom and bust that marred Baum's entire career. West takes us to his Chicago years, when Baum earned his fortune writing the early Oz books, contributing to popular magazines, and supplementing his income by writing under pseudonyms. Much of this work was derivative, but West presents literary fairy tales with decidedly American settings.

Not being an avid baseball fan, I must confess that Hearn's article, "The Wizard Behind the Plate: L. Frank Baum, the Hub City Nine, and Baseball on the Prairie," challenged me the most. Recreating the sole season of the famed Aberdeen Hub City Nine—champions of a year—Hearn provides thick description of Baum's considerable activities promoting his team. Along the way, one learns much about the early professional leagues; the difficulties of supporting pro players in the settlement West; the rivalries that made for lively editorials; the rowdy fans, or "cranks"; and the players themselves, who did not always display gentlemen's...