A hundred years ago, L. Frank Baum introduced delighted children to the Land of Oz. This land, as described in The Wizard of Oz and later books, is a wonderful place where every day brings exciting adventures and problems that are solved by children, adults, animals, scarecrows, and robots talking together as equals. At the same time that Oz is exotic, it is also a recognizably American fairyland, where hierarchy is unselfconsciously ignored and problems get solved by practical ingenuity.
Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, the seventh child in a prosperous family that lived near Syracuse, New York. His father was an enterprising self-made businessman, who speculated in real estate and the petroleum business, …
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