JediKermit's Full Review: Evan Schwartz - Finding Oz
When we visit new and exciting worlds of fantasy or science fiction, whether through books or movies, it's sometimes interesting to discover where those worlds came from. The Narnia of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland all came from somewhere...and in finding these wellsprings, we can sometimes unlock our own creativity. Evan I. Schwartz does a fine job of investigating one of these fountains of creativity in his 2009 book, Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story.
Schwartz, like many of us, grew up enjoying The Wizard of Oz as it played out before him in a yearly ritual on television. It wasn't until he started reading the Oz books to his daughter that he really started to appreciate the genius of the author L. Frank Baum, and he decided to explore Baum's life and see where the genius came from. The results are in a nearly 400 page hardcover book that is basically a biography of Baum's life, and the Gilded Age he lived in. It's a period of history often ignored by historians and writers, so finding this book was a particular pleasure for me.
I've read five or six of Baum's Oz sequels, and although they're hit and miss, the world he created was imaginative and interesting. Schwartz uses the author's biography as a resource to explain the meaning of some of the characters, locations and themes in Oz, and uses these same ideas to foil the claims of other researchers. The chief rumor that needs to be debunked (a favorite of my father) is that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a "parable of populism," and is meant to represent the the debate between the gold standard, silver standard, and the conflict between the western farmers and eastern industrial workers.
Schwartz's book is divided into three sections, each with chapters and titles reminiscent of Oz itself: "No Place Like Home," "Heart of a Tin Man," "The Brainless and the Heartless" are all ways that Baum encounters the world around him. We get fascinating details about his childhood home and life, like his residence in Syracuse which had one of the earliest plank roads; his attendance at a Peekskill military academy, which was accessed by following a road of Ducth pavers (yellow bricks); his life on a chicken farm, like the Gales end up on Kansas. Schwartz finds tidbits that end up in the Oz books, whether by design or by happenstance. It's also fascinating that although we associate The Wizard of Oz with a yearning for home, "there's no place like home" is one of the last sentiments that Baum would have used either as a child or an adult.
Living at the turn of the 20th Century, Baum was living at a time of giants--Rockefeller, Edison, P.T. Barnum and others, and seemed to draw on their personalities and power in creating the wizard. Having lived in Chicago and covered the 1893 World's Fair, the White City seems an obvious inspiration for the Emerald City of Oz. The currents of eastern philosophy and theosophy also eddy through the Oz books, and Schwartz does a good job of explaining these sometimes strange ideas and connecting them with philosophies present in the Oz books.
Most interesting to me is the relationship that Baum had with women--from a domineering mother-in-law vilified by the press for being a crusader for women's rights to his partnership with his wife. These strong women in his life seem to have led him to create a strong heroine in Dorothy Gale (and eventually Ozma, General Jinjur, and other female characters), but also has the effect of inspiring strong and horrid villainesses like the Wicked Witch of the West, Mombi, and others. Much time is spent on the women in Baum's life, and he seems to have had an unusual understanding of how women should be treated and what their potential was.
Above all, Schwartz presents Baum as a creative, interesting man who lived in interesting times. He struggled through several different careers before finally hitting on the Oz story in his mid-forties; the efforts in writing and publishing the books, and the attendant success distills on Baum like a reward long-deserved. For those of us who experienced The Wizard of Oz mostly through the MGM film, Schwartz tells the story of how that came to be, although it was more than a decade after L. Frank Baum passed away.
If you're interested in The Wizard of Oz, the writing process, or turn of the century America, you'll enjoy Finding Oz. It surprised me, inspired me, and will probably make me take a new look at that uniquely American fairyland, Oz.
A groundbreaking new look at the author of an iconic American novel-- The Wizard of Oz --this biography offers profound new insights into the true ori...More at Buy.com
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