The man who was born 156 years ago today is rarely - if ever - included in lists of Great American Writers.  That's a shame, for I think I a real case can be made that Lyman Frank Baum has had as significant an effect on the American consciousness as many of his more appreciated fellows (and more than many, too, for that matter - I'm looking at you, Herman Melville, you over-praised old bore, you).

Is the Emerald City, beckoning in the distance, any less potent a talisman than Fitzgerald's green light on a Long Island dock?

Here we see a healthy sampling of some of Oz's better known citizens toasting their sovereign, the enchanting Ozma of Oz.  The Oz books are can be surprisingly complex things, with their intricate plots and sudden, odd explosions of dark whimsy.  I readily admit that as a child I was particularly taken with Princess Ozma, for example, because she first appears as a little boy, enchanted by an evil witch and only rescued by that same Glinda who sent Dorothy home with a click of her heels (which, in the book are silver; ruby came later).

Somewhere off in storage are all my Oz books, gathering dust these dozen years or more since I got swept off from my own Kansas (well, Manhattan) to this desert as fierce as the Great Sandy Waste that surrounds Oz.  I look forward, some day, to diving back in.

On his birthday, then, let's ourselves (as varied a group, I think, as any gathering of Oz-ites, and twice as fanciful) raise a toast to L. Frank Baum, The Royal Historian of Oz, unsung hero of American literature.  156 seems to me a very Oz-zy age indeed, and I hope that celebrations in that far-off land are appropriately festive.

Spectacular John R. Neill illustration borrowed from that cornucopia of all things Oz-ian, Hungry Tiger Talk. 

I had a dream the other night, and it reminded me of one of my first childhood crushes. It might surprise you, but she was, in fact, a girl. Or at least a princess:


She was Ozma of Oz, as drawn by John Rea Neill. I read and reread Oz books, as much, I think, for the sinuous Art Nouveau lines of his illustrations as anything. They seemed a perfect complement to the sometimes equally sinuous plots.

While Ozma remained a favorite, she had rivals. One was Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter, with her floating robes like a Jane Austen heroine in midflight:

But best of all, O Best Beloved, was the antic Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, a gleefully amoral presence in L. Frank Baum's sometimes starchy world:

She had an enviable philosophy of life. I just looked it up, and perhaps she was more of an influence than ever I knew:

Then she laughed again, long and merrily, and the Glass Cat crept out from under the table and said:

"I don't blame you for laughing at yourself. Aren't you horrid?"

"Horrid?" she replied. "Why, I'm thoroughly delightful. I'm an Original, if you please, and therefore incomparable. Of all the comic, absurd, rare and amusing creatures the world contains, I must be the supreme freak... But I'm glad--I'm awfully glad!--that I'm just what I am, and nothing else."

As for Neill, he seems to have had a fairly quiet, and, after a certain point, a highly Oz-centered life. He ended up writing three Oz books himself (although they fall outside the canon as contained in my grandparents' upstairs bookshelf) and was known as "Imperial Illustrator of Oz".

And one could do a great deal worse, no?