WW: Baum was a entrepreneur in every sense of he word, yet he failed at many of his attempts to start businesses.  What do you think kept him going through the hard times?

WW:

EIS:  I do think the whole episode of dropping out of the military academy as a young teen has a lasting, traumatic impact on him. I think he did struggle to compensate for that, in a way, which I explore in the book.

WW: Baum started writing in his teens; what do you consider his "golden years'?

EIS: He did expand on his themes and beliefs and many, many other things. But he never went back to re-read his own prior books and he rarely edited what he wrote, so things in his later books go off in endless directions. That’s why I didn’t even try to make sense of it all. Mostly, he was just having fun and earning a living the way he wanted to, as a writer.

WW:

EIS: He was never really a reporter. He wasn’t good at collecting factual information, and didn’t seem to interview people very often. He wasn’t a hack, though. He was a commentator. He was a humorist. He used the news as fodder for columns and poems and editorials. He would fit in great today, as an occasional contributor on NPR.

EIS: Because The Wizard of Oz taps into the archetypes of the human mind. Baum was able to express basic impulses, such as yearning, fear, dread, hope, wonder, determination, comfort. He did it through vivid characters and by infusing meaning into concrete symbols, from the cyclone to the Yellow Brick Road to the magic shoes to the Emerald City to “home.” The MGM movie, of course, propelled these icons to a whole new level. But it was Baum who transformed common sights into these mythic images. This is why I quote Joseph Campbell throughout the book. Although Campbell never wrote about Oz, he unraveled the workings of the mythic imagination better than anyone.

EIS: Baum’s mother-in-law joined the Theosophical Society around 1885, so Blavatsky’s literature was around him from at least that point on. Baum seemed to turn to this faith most dramatically during the depths of his despair, in his darkest days in Dakota, in 1890 and 1891. Frank and his wife Maud both joined the Society in 1892. But Theosophy itself was largely inspired by Hinduism and Buddhism, and he was also drawn to the philosophies of those ancient religions in these years too. The spiritual influences in The Wizard of Oz are subtle but fundamental.

WW: Your research points to four giants of the late 19th century (Rockefeller, Edison, Barnum & Vivekananda) as inspiration for The Wizard of Oz.  Tell us a bit about Swami Vivekananda and how Baum knew of him. 

EIS: Yes, Baum crossed paths with all of these larger-than-life figures, and I show how each inspired aspects of the shape-shifting character of the great and powerful Wizard himself. Swami Vivekananda’s own story is amazing. He was selected by the nation of India to introduce Hinduism to the West, at the World Parliament of Religions, part of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. This, of course, is the fair that inspired Baum’s creation of the Emerald City.

The Swami was the surprise sensation of the entire expo. Vivekananda preached a set of meditations called the “Four Yogas,” describing the four paths to the True Self: the path of wisdom, the path of compassion, the path of courage and the path of inner harmony. (I think we may know four characters who travel those very paths.) The Swami was a major presence in Chicago in the six years after that too. His image and his words were everywhere. He even gave a series of lectures at the Fine Arts Building, where W.W. Denslow kept his illustration studio.

EIS: I live in Connecticut, and I drove about six or seven times to the Syracuse area for research. I also traveled to Aberdeen, South Dakota and to Los Angeles, with a few other smaller excursions. But one of my most fun finds was in Chicago. Baum worked briefly in 1891 as a reporter for The Chicago Evening Post, but the paper carried no bylines. Buried in the microfilm, dated during that short stint, I found some curious articles, with trademark phrases, such as one about the philosophy of moving that contains the phrase “there’s no place like home” and a story about a Thomas Edison press conference, in which the reporter covering it writes that the Wizard of Menlo Park has a “massive head.” That was exciting.  Here's another one: landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, in the months before the Chicago World’s Fair was to open, was frantically trying to change the dominant color of “The White City”….to green.

WW: There are several theories about how Baum came up with the name "Oz".  What do you believe?

EIS: The origin the Oz name remains a mystery. But the much-circulated story about the “O-Z” file cabinet drawer probably never happened, as his wife Maud made that clear in a written interview she gave. Baum seemed to have made up that tale a few years after the fact in order to give reporters an answer that they would understand. Other theories are more plausible, and I discuss them in the book. For instance, Oz is a Biblical word, meaning “inner strength” in Hebrew. But the filing cabinet tale has been distracting, because it seems to suggest that the Land of Oz is just a patch of nonsense, rather than the highly meaningful place it is.

WW: Where do you place L. Frank Baum in literary history?  Was he just a writer looking to make money, or do you think he had an agenda with his works? 

EIS: He was no Fitzgerald or Hemingway, yet he became one of the best children’s authors of the 20^th century, influencing everyone from Maurice Sendak to JRR Tolkien to J.K. Rowling. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz really was the Harry Potter of its time, as inspired as anything anyone ever wrote. Baum was looking to make money, but so were a lot of writers. I believe there was indeed an agenda other than to entertain children, but he concealed the story he was really telling inside a fantastic fable. He often used his stories to advance the agenda of his late mother-in-law, the women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage.  I hope to show people where the great American story came from, because it largely comes from our country’s great and not-so-great history and Frank Baum’s particular path through it. I also hope to show people that there’s a deep reason why The Wizard of Oz has captured our collective imagination for more than a century. This is a story that still helps guide our own lives today..

WW: Based on your research, why do you think Baum wanted to end the Oz series? 

EIS: The Oz series became a job for him, an obligation to his many fans. And they sometimes read like they were scattershot and forced. Plus, he had spent his whole life moving on to new things. He thought he should do the same with his stories. But the years after Baum’s first Oz novel are barely covered in my book. My whole focus is “finding oz.”

WW: How did you first "find Oz"?  Was it through the MGM film or the book series?