Recent Reading: Finding Oz

When I was a child, I read with avidity the Oz books; when I was in college, I read some excellent fiction on the meaning of the Oz books (inevitably, one of them imposed a heavy nad anachronistic homosexual content) and even found some of the non-Oz materials penned by L. Frank Baum (the less said about Alan Moore's Lost Girls, the better) but until recently I had never read a biography of Baum which explored the possible sources from his personal life which may have contributed to the elements in the Wizard of Oz. Schwartz approaches Baum's life as a story itself - an appropriate choice given the way Baum himself understood life - but also elucidates Baum's connections to radical feminism, Theosophism, oil monopolies, snake oil salesmanship, manifest destiny and Native American genocide. Some of these themes appear only in the book, whereas other reminders of Baum's life appear only in the movie. And for the record, I have never found the "all a dream" ending of the movie satisfying. After I had finished the book, I understood the nineteenth-century context and the personal drive of the author of the great American fairytale.