L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) was an American author who set out to write a fairy tale that owed nothing to Europe — no moral at the end, no punishment, and an American girl from Kansas at the centre of it. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz appeared in 1900 with colour illustrations by W. W. Denslow and was the best-selling children's book of its first two years. Baum wrote thirteen more Oz books, several of them because his readers demanded them, and the series was continued by other hands after his death. He had failed at shopkeeping, chicken-breeding, acting and newspapers before any of it.