Oz behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series

By Erika Haber

Recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Research Achievement Award in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University

In 1939, Aleksandr Volkov (1891-1977) published Wizard of the Emerald City, a revised version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Only a line on the copyright page explained the book as a "reworking" of the American story. Readers credited Volkov as author rather than translator. Volkov, an unknown and inexperienced author before World War II, tried to break into the politically charged field of Soviet children's literature with an American fairy tale. During the height of Stalin's purges, Volkov adapted and published this fairy tale in the Soviet Union despite enormous, sometimes deadly, obstacles.

Marketed as Volkov's original work, Wizard of the Emerald City spawned a series that was translated into more than a dozen languages and became a staple of Soviet popular culture, not unlike Baum's fourteen-volume Oz series in the United States. Volkov's books inspired a television series, plays, films, musicals, animated cartoons, and a museum. Today, children's authors and fans continue to add volumes to the Magic Land series. Several generations of Soviet Russian and Eastern European children grew up with Volkov's writings, yet know little about the author and even less about his American source, L. Frank Baum. Most Americans have never heard of Volkov and know nothing of his impact in the Soviet Union, and those who do know of him regard his efforts as plagiarism.

Erika Haber demonstrates how the works of both Baum and Volkov evolved from being popular children's literature and became compelling and enduring cultural icons in both the US and USSR/Russia, despite being dismissed and ignored by critics, scholars, and librarians for many years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781496813619

Erika Haber

Erika Haber is professor of Russian language, literature, and culture at Syracuse University. She is author of several volumes, including The Myth of the Non-Russian: Iskander and Aitmatov's Magical Universe.

Book preview

Introduction

THE APPEAL OF THE WIZARD AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

In 1939 in the Soviet Union Aleksandr Melent’evich Volkov, a forty-eight-year-old Moscow mathematician and budding children’s author, published Wizard of the Emerald City (Volshebnik Izumrudnogo goroda), a revised and amended version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Except for a single sentence on the copyright page to this first edition, where the publisher explained that the book represented a reworking of the American writer L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Volkov got credit for the work as author rather than translator; thus, only Volkov’s name appeared on the book’s cover and title page. An unknown and inexperienced author, Volkov was trying to break into the politically charged field of Soviet children’s literature with a potentially risky foreign fairy tale. To make matters worse, this was during the height of Stalin’s Purges, when writing that displeased the leader could prove deadly for publishers as well as authors. Volkov managed to pull off this remarkable feat of publishing America’s first fairy tale in Stalin’s Soviet Union despite seemingly enormous obstacles.

Soviet children delighted in his Wizard of the Emerald City and wrote Volkov scores of letters, begging him to continue the fairy tale. Instead, Volkov tried his hand at writing in safer and more educational genres for children, including historical fiction, popular science, and military tales. In 1959, when the Soviet Union was experiencing a period of cultural relaxation after Stalin’s death, Volkov produced a considerably more reworked edition of his first version of the Wizard, complete with new, color illustrations. In this second edition, he further restructured chapters, changed names, and corrected what he considered to be errors in the original story. Notwithstanding his liberal reworking of the manuscript, the story still resembled Baum’s and a new generation of Soviet children fell in love with the tale, never knowing or suspecting its origins. Before his death in 1977, Volkov went on to write five more original sequels to the story, which collectively came to be known as his Magic Land series: Urfin Dzhius and His Wooden Soldiers (Urfin Dzhius i ego dereviannye soldaty), 1963; Seven Underground Kings (Sem’ podzemnykh korolei), 1964; Fiery God of the Marrans (Ognennyi bog Marranov), 1968; Yellow Fog (Zheltyi tuman), 1970; and Secret of the Abandoned Castle (Taina zabroshennogo zamka), published posthumously in 1982.

Not unlike the fate of Baum’s own fourteen-volume Oz series in the United States, Volkov’s Magic Land books became a staple of Soviet popular culture. Since 1940, Volkov’s revised version of Baum and his sequels have spurred puppet and stage plays, an opera, a TV cartoon series, a children’s musical, a feature film, and most recently the creation of a museum devoted to Volkov and his writings. His reworked Wizard appeared in many other languages, from Armenian to Urdu, and was marketed abroad as his own original work with no obvious mention of Baum. After Volkov’s death, epigones appeared in the Soviet Union and East Germany to further develop his series. Even today authors in Russia continue to add volumes to Volkov’s Magic Land series, just as American authors, TV screenwriters, and filmmakers have continued to rework and develop Baum’s Oz series. By now several generations of Soviet, Russian, and Eastern European children have grown up with Volkov’s writings, yet they still know little about the Soviet author and even less about L. Frank Baum and his influential story. Most Americans have never heard of Aleksandr Volkov and know nothing of Baum’s impact in the Soviet Union and beyond; those who have heard of Volkov often regard his efforts as plagiarism motivated by Cold War politics.

Oz behind the Iron Curtain explores the intertwined stories of Volkov and his Magic Land series against the backdrop of Baum and his Oz books, and studies both sets of works within the necessary context of the development of children’s literature in the United States and the Soviet Union. My work considers two closely related questions: first, what has made Baum’s story, celebrated as America’s first fairy tale, able to transcend cultural barriers and find popularity behind the Iron Curtain where American values and ideals were distinctly unpopular during the Cold War? Second, why and how did Volkov pull off this feat of transferring an iconic American story into a series that not only fit within the required models of Soviet children’s writing, but also touched the hearts of young readers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries?

It is impossible to tell Aleksandr Volkov’s story without knowing about L. Frank Baum and the history of his own remarkable collection of Oz books, since they provided the basis and inspiration for at least the first and most important book of the Russian fairy tale series. Interestingly, the men and their books share a number of meaningful features. Baum and Volkov became published authors in their forties, almost accidentally, after pursuing other careers. Both men shared a talent for woodworking and built furniture in their spare time. The Oz and the Magic Land books are far better known in the United States and in Russia than either Baum or Volkov himself. Neither Baum nor Volkov wanted to continue his fairy tale series, but each eventually ceded to the insistent demands of his young audience. Both authors published many other books for children, but none of these came close to the popularity of their original series. Not surprisingly, the first book in each of the two series has been far more popular and influential than those that came later. Despite the fact that they are unmistakably children’s books and neither author showed much interest in politics, both books have been interpreted widely and used for political and social commentary both in the United States and the Soviet Union. Both sets of books have enjoyed a long run of popularity with children and adults, have found an enduring place in popular culture, and have spawned all manner of spinoffs, epigones, and merchandising. In other words, both series have become exceedingly profitable brands that show no sign of losing their currency in the twenty-first century. Despite these clear signs of popularity, or perhaps because of them, both series have been largely ignored or dismissed by critics and scholars for long periods, but have finally become the subject of serious study. Culturally significant but critically suspect, the Oz and Magic Land books share a fascinating publication history that far outshines the popularity of the authors themselves.

Arguably one of the most widely recognized icons in the United States, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz makes its remarkable cultural influence felt today in greeting cards, blogs, films, advertisements, TV shows, smart phone apps, journalism, cartoons, chat rooms, computer games, and more. Just about everywhere you look, you can find an allusion to the story in one form or another. Mention the Emerald City, Cowardly Lion, or Wicked Witch of the West and everyone immediately knows the reference and has a mental image to match. However, ask the average person on the street about the authorship of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and one often receives a blank stare. More often than not when people hear the title, they think of the MGM movie musical, The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland. Not that the film itself was so well received upon its release in August 1939, but when the rights were sold for TV broadcast in 1956, the centennial of Baum’s birth, it became an annual event in homes all over the United States. Now, of course, it is available for viewing year-round on DVD all over the world. To celebrate the film’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2014, Warner Brothers released a digitally remastered 3-D version in theaters and a two-disc special-edition DVD for home viewing. As a result of the film’s ubiquity, people of all ages and cultures recognize allusions to Munchkins, Toto, and Oz even if they do not know that L. Frank Baum created them in 1900 for his children’s book. Many of the most well-known and often-quoted lines come not from the book but rather from the film. When Disney released the Sam Raimi prequel Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013, few critics and even fewer moviegoers recognized that the china doll character came from Baum’s original story or knew that Baum had worked as a traveling salesman selling china and glass in 1892, an experience that probably prompted him to write his The Dainty China Country chapter in the first place.

Despite the relative obscurity of L. Frank Baum, his famous book has set its own impressive records. Before entering the public domain in 1956, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had sold domestically some 2.8 million hardcover copies (Hackett 1956, 65). This figure does not take into account the editions sold as foreign publications and in other formats, such as abridged and popular editions, paperbacks, and pop-up books. The numbers for all editions could easily be much higher, but during and just after WWII, due to paper shortages, demand often outpaced supply for books, especially for children’s books (Hackett 1967, 2). Even just using the domestic sales figures, Baum’s book outsold all other juvenile literature in the first half of the twentieth century by a wide margin (Hackett 1956, 65). In this country, the original book has never been out of print and can regularly be found for sale in new editions and collections, despite its having been written over a hundred years ago.

The foreign reception of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been equally extraordinary. In addition to selling Oz books across the United States, the publisher F. K. Reilly shipped foreign orders to England, Australia, Japan, India, and South Africa, among others (Reilly to F. McLearn, 3 November 1930, BP, SCRC-SUL). Translations of Baum’s first volume appeared in just about every known written language, from Arabic to Uzbek. A Braille edition exists as well. Between December 1903 and October 1954, the sales of foreign editions totaled over 212,000 (Bobbs-Merrill Co. files, n.d., BP, SCRC-SUL). Numbers of editions sold abroad are notoriously difficult to calculate accurately because of the existence of differences in copyright laws and translation policies. The publisher quite often did not even know about editions published abroad until long after their publication. Despite the inevitable financial losses from these unsanctioned translations, L. Frank Baum took great pleasure in the foreign editions, and in 1909 remarked proudly, My books have been translated into almost every language including Japanese, and in my travels abroad I have found them cherished by children, from Egypt … to the interior of the Philippines, and a friend said he saw one in a house in Hong Kong, China (Kessler 1909, 62–63). Unfortunately, Baum passed away before he could see his book published in the Soviet Union, where it quickly became a cherished childhood favorite as well.

Undeniably the most popular and successful foreign edition, Aleksandr Volkov’s reworked version of Baum’s story coincidentally appeared the same year that MGM released the film version. Volkov’s records reveal that his 1939 Wizard of the Emerald City was printed in seven editions for a total of 239,000 copies and by 1963 eight editions of the 1959 version had been published for a total of 675,000 copies (Galkina 2006, 265). With numbers like these, it is no wonder that Volkov felt compelled to continue the fairy tale series. The initial edition of his first sequel, Urfin Dzhius and His Wooden Soldiers, sold 300,000 copies by the end of its first year in print (Galkina 2006, 265). Since the Soviet Union did not have a free market economy, these publishing numbers do not represent demand, only supply; nor do they tell the whole story, because like many literary works in the Soviet Union, Urfin Dzhius first appeared in print serially in two Soviet newspapers between 1962 and 1963, before coming out in book form in 1963. A common publishing practice in the Soviet Union, this initial serial publication process occurred with most of Volkov’s sequels, which were also translated into dozens of languages and published widely throughout the Soviet Union and beyond. English retranslations of the original and first translations of the sequels began appearing in the sixties in the United States. The translation situation inevitably became complicated when Eastern Bloc and Asian translators occasionally used Volkov’s text but Baum’s title for their translations. This made it infinitely more difficult to determine whether the publication should be considered a translation of Baum or of Volkov.

Popularity and novelty never determined publication in Soviet Russia, however, where publishing remained highly political, time sensitive, and heavily censored. Baum’s book has been read in any manner of ways, revealing some pretty far-fetched interpretations, both at home and abroad. The Soviets used it as Cold War propaganda to show the poverty and despair found in early twentieth-century America. Since Volkov’s name was on the cover rather than Baum’s, the book lost a considerable amount of its propaganda appeal. It is not nearly as impressive for a Soviet author to paint the United States in poor colors, as it would have been for an American to do so. Nonetheless, the majority of Volkov’s series appeared during the sixties and seventies, the height of the Cold War period, when tensions escalated between the United States and the Soviet Union, so surely timing and political considerations played some part in their publication. Timing played an entirely different though no less significant role in bolstering the popularity of the American series as well. Because of the considerable demand for the series and the publisher’s desire to cash in on it, Baum churned out a new Oz book almost on an annual basis, often in time for Christmas. This undoubtedly created an eager and expectant audience in the United States. Although the writings of both of these men have been enjoyed by millions of people, in dozens of languages, all over the world, few know the fascinating stories behind these authors and how their books came to be published and interpreted.

In both the United States and the Soviet Union children’s literature proved to be a central area of concern because of its inherent potential to shape the thoughts and determine the values of the next generation of citizens. Consequently, both countries sought to attach nationalistic and political meanings to the Oz stories and to their publication abroad. My study illuminates how the politicizing of the Oz books in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War reflected an attempt to claim cultural superiority, and neglected to consider the works and their authors within the essential context of children’s literature. Providing background for both authors and critical analysis of their works, Oz behind the Iron Curtain allows readers to finally move beyond the misrepresentations of these authors and their writings, largely as a result of these extraliterary issues. Additionally, it explores the complicated and little-known (in the West) development of Russian children’s literature, especially the long history of borrowing and adaptation of Western works. My book also details the growth and influence of fan fiction, which has helped the Oz story remain relevant for over a hundred years.

This study will change the way both Americans and Russians think about Baum’s and Volkov’s literary activities, and it will also explain the enormous influence that Baum’s tale has enjoyed around the world. By setting my discussion within the historical evolution of children’s reading in both societies, I provide insight into why the publication of the Oz books at home and abroad was both bold and significant. Ultimately, I demonstrate how these works evolved from being popular children’s literature to become compelling and enduring cultural icons in both the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, despite being dismissed and ignored by critics, scholars, and librarians for many years.

To understand the creative processes and extraliterary motivations of both Baum and Volkov, it is essential to examine their lives and the events that brought them both to children’s literature. Relying mostly on archival work at Syracuse University and the Tomsk State Pedagogical University, the first two chapters provide biographical information on L. Frank Baum and A. M. Volkov respectively, thereby placing a study of each man within his own personal and historical circumstances. I also discuss the belated critical attention given to both authors, which accounts for their relative anonymity.

Although there has been no shortage of Baum biographies in recent years, Baum remains a largely misunderstood author because of his eldest son’s efforts to rewrite his father’s life posthumously, which have impacted many subsequent biographies. My discussion of his life and writings tries to avoid the usual hypothesizing and instead focuses on the elements that informed his Oz books. This includes his idyllic and privileged childhood in and around Syracuse, New York, that allowed him to pursue his creative interests and passions well into adulthood and helped him to develop his imagination and fantasy, which constitute the most critical elements of his Oz series.

Like Baum, Volkov was largely ignored during his lifetime and his complete biography has yet to be written; thus, my manuscript offers the fullest picture of his life and times to date and introduces him to the English-speaking audience. From his family’s Old Believer teachings and his childhood in Kazakhstan, to his school days in Tomsk, Siberia, and beyond to his graduate work in Moscow, Volkov’s life and writing were shaped by his educational experiences. More than anything else, Volkov’s desire to teach and inspire children explain his treatment of Baum’s story and the development of his own set of sequels.

In chapter 3, I develop the necessary deeper context for understanding the publication histories of both authors and the significance of their writings within the pedagogical and publishing trends in each society. A discussion of some of the most relevant movements and personalities in the development and history of children’s literature in each culture, chapter 3 provides a comparative study of the climate and circumstances in which these authors produced their works, and the influences and precursors that helped shape their efforts and determine their reception. Most importantly, I trace and explain the long history of literary adaptation of Western literature in Russia, which influenced Volkov’s efforts with Baum’s text. Understanding the climate and circumstances in which these authors produced their works further explains the distinguishing characteristics of their works, their lasting appeal to children, and their harsh treatment by librarians and scholars.

The fourth chapter relates the fascinating story of how Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels came to be written and published within the historical context examined in the previous chapter. Baum wrote his children’s books during a period before there were specialized children’s book publishers and when librarians still strongly controlled children’s reading. I contend that this explains the paradoxically poor initial reception that Oz experienced, despite its incredible popularity and enduring presence, and reveals why Baum’s works were marketed as being intrinsically American. Additionally, this chapter details the crucial work of the Oz illustrators, and how the iconic print images and universally recognized characters morphed into other stories and genres over time, and ultimately created the iconic forty-book Oz series.

In chapter 5, I discuss in detail how Volkov managed to use Baum’s Oz to break into Soviet children’s writing at the most unlikely time. Providing a detailed comparative analysis of Volkov’s 1939 and 1959 editions, including the work of both Russian illustrators, this chapter demonstrates precisely how and why Volkov revised Baum’s story. I examine the all-important issue of whether Volkov’s work should be considered a translation, adaptation, or rewrite, and I situate his efforts within the historical context of foreign borrowing in Soviet children’s literature. I also discuss his five Magic Land sequels and describe how the series has been developed in other mediums, thus creating a parallel universe to Oz in the Soviet Union.

Studying the paradox of reception that Volkov experienced with his series, in chapter 6 I analyze the political context for the Sovietization of Magic Land in the Soviet Union, Russia, and in the West. Additionally, this chapter explores the history of further translations of Volkov, including the English translations of the Magic Land series, once the story made its way back to the United States. To explain the legal and ethical issues of these transcultural efforts, it also investigates the complicated and thorny issues of copyright law and fan fiction. I take up the life of Volkov’s series after his death and examine how and why it has continued to develop and thrive not just in Russia, but in Germany as well.

The conclusion discusses the long-delayed arrival of Baum’s original Oz in Russia, where it was finally published and displayed side by side with Volkov’s books a full century later. It also examines the reasons for the continued popularity of both Oz and Magic Land in contemporary society and how they have both become enormously influential cultural markers and merchandising brands in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Russia. Finally, it details the disturbing recent return of government influence in Russian children’s literature and what this has meant for both Baum’s and Volkov’s complicated reception in Russia today.

Telling a captivating, relevant, and heretofore untold story that reaches from eighteenth-century New England to present-day Siberia, this book provides the essential historical and literary context for scholars and fans alike to finally understand and appreciate the universal appeal of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

1

THE UNKNOWN HISTORIAN OF OZ

That both L. Frank Baum and Aleksandr M. Volkov, despite the considerable odds against them, managed to create works that would live on long after their deaths and continue to this day to influence the cultures in which they were created, speaks to the tremendous talent and great fortitude of both men. Many miles and years separated Baum and Volkov, yet they shared a number of common experiences on the way to becoming prolific children’s authors. Their individual stories point to the play of fortuitous circumstances that allowed each of them to meet and engage with people who would inspire, support, and promote their early writing efforts. Both authors entered the world of children’s literature at a point when their respective cultures were primed and ready for creative, new contributors. Of course, each possessed both the vivid imagination and ability to engage and entertain children that were essential to his success. Nonetheless, the road to authorship was neither clear nor easy in either case, and both men had to surmount any number of obstacles along the way, in their own lives as well as in the times and societies in which they lived.

Whereas Volkov’s biographical monograph has yet to be written, Baum’s has been the topic of several volumes, but considerable misinformation has also been written about both men and disseminated in print and, especially, on the Internet. By examining the backgrounds and influences on these two men and critically reviewing what has been written about them, I hope to provide a deeper and more accurate context for understanding the trajectory of their careers and the impact of their writings. As a means of understanding why Baum’s story has had such a long and productive history and as essential backstory needed to appreciate Volkov’s achievements in Soviet Russia, this book begins with a discussion of L. Frank Baum’s fairy tale life and works.

EARLY ATTEMPTS AT TELLING THE LIFE STORY OF L. FRANK BAUM

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, yet the first biographical monograph on Baum did not appear until 1961, more than forty years after his death. Before that publication, only three short pieces of scholarly writing on Baum’s work were published that mentioned in passing a few salient details about his life. None appeared in his lifetime. The first, a 1929 University of Washington chapbook, entitled Utopia Americana by English professor Edward Wagenknecht, featured the earliest scholarly biographical information on Baum. Briefly summing up Baum’s life and achievements in one long paragraph before moving on to discuss his writing, Wagenknecht variously calls him a journalist, an editor, a playwright, as well as a voluminous writer, the author of some fifty odd volumes, nearly all of them for children (18). In 1934, James Thurber followed up with a pleasant although superficial essay of appreciation published in the New Republic that relied heavily on Wagenknecht’s work. Thurber provided no new details regarding Baum’s biography, but chronicled his futile attempts to move beyond the Oz books (141–42). By the time he died in 1919, Baum had written fourteen books in the Oz series, nearly two dozen non-Oz books, another thirty books published under six different pseudonyms, and dozens of short stories. Yet for such a large oeuvre, only these two brief accounts of Baum’s life made it into print before the fifties. Truly, no one knew the Royal Historian of Oz.

Nearly six decades after the first publication of Baum’s Oz, in 1957, Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye edited a comprehensive collection entitled The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. In addition to a new, black-and-white version of Baum’s first Oz tale, their book included an informative chapter by Gardner that promised to recount here for the first time the full story of Baum’s remarkable career (Gardner and Nye 1994, 20). In his introductory essay The Royal Historian of Oz, Gardner finally provided rich and copious biographical details as well as anecdotes from Baum’s life and career. Moreover, Nye’s chapter represented the first serious attempt at critical scholarship on Baum and his Oz series, and did an admirable job of teasing out the strengths and weaknesses of Baum’s creation. An anonymous review in the Saturday Review Trade Winds announced the publication of the book with a theatrical flourish: Who tried to kill the Wizard of Oz? We have had our suspicions for some years and are now pleased to see that Michigan State University Press has made a contribution to the fight to free L. Frank Baum from literary bondage (4 May 1957, 4). Gardner and Nye’s work at last brought attention and respectability to an author long overlooked and ignored by critics and scholars. Unfortunately, Gardner and Nye received numerous details about Baum’s life from his eldest son, Frank Joslyn (Gardner and Nye 1994, vii). This information would ultimately prove problematic for much of the future biographical work on Baum.

A year earlier, Frank Joslyn Baum had approached Russell P. MacFall, a night editor at the Chicago Daily Tribune, to begin collaborating on the first monograph-length biography of his late father. With an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago, MacFall had begun researching a biography on L. Frank Baum a few years earlier. His efforts attracted the attention of Frank Joslyn, who had shown interest in following in his father’s footsteps by continuing the Oz series with a 1938 sequel, entitled The Laughing Dragon of Oz. Unable to interest his father’s publisher, Reilly & Lee, Frank Joslyn took out a trademark on the word Oz and published his book with the Whitman Publishing Company in Racine, Wisconsin. This was a controversial and costly move since his mother, Maud, controlled her late husband’s copyrights; in agreement with Reilly & Lee, Maud had allowed for the continuation of the series with authors chosen by the publisher. The legal battle that ensued created bad feelings and long-lasting family problems for the Baums. After Maud died in 1953, Frank Joslyn’s earlier behavior and the ill will it caused left his brothers unwilling to support his projects. The estrangement allowed him to create his father’s past primarily from his own memories and imagination.

Before approaching MacFall, Frank Joslyn attempted to write his father’s story himself. Early reviewers found his manuscript full of bias and errors, and he was unable to find a publisher for the work (BP, SCRC-SUL). Frank Joslyn next reached out to John Frederick Jack Snow, a print and radio journalist and a retired army sergeant, who had been stationed at the air base near Syracuse, New York. While living in Upstate New York, Snow had begun collecting material and conducting interviews for his own work on Baum. In addition to having written two volumes in the Oz series, Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) and Shaggy Man of Oz (1949), Snow had published a chronicle of the characters of Oz and brief biographies of the series’ authors and illustrators, entitled Who’s Who in Oz (1954). Frank Joslyn sent Jack Snow a 100,000-word manuscript and an offer to work fifty-fifty on the future biography, but Snow never contributed to the project. Shortly thereafter, Frank Joslyn learned of MacFall’s efforts and offered him the same deal, hoping that MacFall would be able to redraft what Baum had already written in such a way as to get it published (BP, SCRC-SUL). After exchanging a few letters with Frank Joslyn, MacFall realized that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to proceed with his own biography of Baum without Frank Joslyn’s support. MacFall agreed to work with Frank Joslyn on the first book-length biography in late August 1956, fully one hundred years after L. Frank Baum’s birth.

The collaborative writing process was long and difficult. Frank Joslyn sent MacFall what he had already written, and MacFall explained that We began by tossing out the greater part of it and started over (Chicago Daily Tribune 12 October 1961, 57). As a journalist and researcher, MacFall set about writing dozens of letters to anyone remotely connected to L. Frank Baum as well as to the town clerks, village historians, and local newspapers in all the places that the Baum family had lived. Using this painstaking process, MacFall succeeded in uncovering a wealth of details about the family and L. Frank’s childhood. Since little had been published and so many myths perpetuated about the author of Oz, MacFall admitted that the project called for a lot of detective work (Chicago Daily Tribune 12 October 1961, 57). During this time, MacFall maintained his editorial job at the newspaper, often working on the biography in the wee hours of the morning, when the paper had already gone to press.

In addition to his unpublished manuscript, Frank Joslyn sent detailed letters to MacFall containing his own memories and stories that had been passed on to him. At times, however, it seems that Frank Joslyn valued creativity over fact. In letters to MacFall from December 1956, Frank Joslyn repeatedly suggested that MacFall should add more color to the biography even if it meant including fiction (F. J. Baum to MacFall 5 and 11 December 1956, BP, SCRC-SUL). Evidence of the hyperbole of