Some kind of wonderful / Punk made plain

Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times; and Parker Molloy, author of The Present Age, a newsletter about the intersection of media, politics, and culture.

Issue No. 220

The Power All Along
Sam Thielman

Just Good Writing
Parker Molloy

The Power All Along

by Sam Thielman

There is perhaps no more American book than L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, which completed its first printing in January of 1901. It opened a fantasy cycle that spans fourteen books written by Baum himself until his death in 1919, at which point the series was such a spectacular success for his publishers that a trivial event like the death of its author didn’t even slow down the pace of publication—this too, a solidly American tradition—and by the time the series petered out in 1963, Baum had contributed fewer than half of the series’ forty volumes, though his were to prove the most enduring.

Though his heroine was a poor-but-hardy farmgirl, Lyman Frank Baum himself was a sickly child from a wealthy exurban family. At the age of fourteen he collapsed with chest pains and possibly a full-blown heart attack while he was being caned at a military boarding school in Peeskill, and returned home. Guilty over the harsh treatment to which he had subjected his son, his father Benjamin gave him a small printing press for his next birthday. Baum continued to live with his parents into his 20s in their six-bedroom mansion outside Syracuse.

The region was famous for its outré religious movements. In addition to the 19th century’s legions of revival preachers and their Great Awakenings, there were the “group-marriage” advocates called The Oneida Community, who counted Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield, among their number; the Millerites, awaiting the Second Coming of Christ, which their leader confidently predicted would arrive on October 22, 1844; the Fox sisters, who invented the public séance; and Joseph Smith and the Mormons. One historian, according to Evan I. Schwartz’s biography of Baum, Finding Oz, called the region “The Burned-Over District,” reasoning that the fires of religious fervor had used up all the available fuel in the area and there were no more fresh souls to be had. Baum’s Oz borrows a great deal from the upstate New York of his childhood and from South Dakota, where he eventually moved and published a newspaper that advocated for the extermination of the Sioux, this time with a big-boy printing press. (Also extremely American.)