The two men could not have been more different. Denslow, a hard-bitten newspaper artist with whom he had collaborated on an earlier juvenile, Father Goose: His Rook. The next day, he took his collection of notes to W. After the children had gone, he went to his desk, pulled out a handful of scrap paper, and jotted it down. “The land of Oz!” exclaimed the storyteller and continued with the tale, unaware that he had added a new word to the English language.īaum seldom bothered to write down his stories, but he was strangely attracted to this tale. In the next room were filing cabinets, and one bore the letters O-Z. Baum?” Stumped, Baum looked around him for inspiration. One of the children asked, “What was the name of this land, Mr. He gave no thought to what he was saying and later wrote in amazement, “The characters surprised even me-it was as though they were living people.” Baum told of a little Kansas farm girl named Dorothy who was carried by a cyclone to a strange land where she met a live scarecrow, a man made of tin, and a cowardly lion. Sitting down with the children surrounding him, he began to talk. After a hard day’s work, Baum often turned to fantasy as many men turn to alcohol. The man was Lyman Frank Baum, and his best-known book began to take form when a group of children, led by his own four boys, waylaid him one evening in his modest Chicago home, demanding a story. Frank Baum with an audience of young Oz buffs, 1905 For, aside from my evident inability to do anything ‘great,’ 1 have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp … but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one’s heart.” L. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. A the turn of the century, a disillusioned man who had failed at almost everything he had attempted wrote to his sister: “When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |