L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum was an American author best known for his children's fantasy, especially The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first of his fourteen Oz books. Born in Chittenango, New York, in 1856, he and his wife opened a store in Aberdeen, South Dakota, edited a newspaper there, and later worked as a reporter in Chicago, where he published that first Oz book in 1900. Beyond Oz, he wrote dozens of other novels, short stories, and poems, and he died in 1919.