Faith J. Cormier wrote this review.
Finding Oz is a biography of L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books. Rather than being one of those ghastly concoctions that look at their subjects’ public lives in total isolation from the private influences on them, Finding Oz painstakingly catalogues Baum’s private and public worlds from infancy on up.
It’s a fascinating story, too. Baum had umpteen careers, mostly in retail of some sort, and failed at all of them despite his best efforts. His birth family was interesting enough, but his in-laws were extraordinary. His mother-in-law was Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the most important members of the woman suffrage movement. His wife, Maud Gage, was an intelligent woman and a worthy daughter of her mother.
Evan Schwartz carefully traces the effect every failure (and even the occasional success), every move and every family member had on Baum and his work. Most surprising to me was his thesis that Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz partly in expiation for some stupid, ignorant, pro-genocidal remarks he had made about American Indians when he was a newspaper editor in the Dakotas, partly as an expression of the faith in Theosophy he had absorbed from his mother-in-law.
Finding Oz is illustrated with numerous black and white drawings and photos. The endpapers are a modern (1980) map of Oz. There are detailed endnotes and an index
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
