Okay, so updates need more regularity. But I do have a good excuse, as the madness with school has yet again begun.

Anyway, a new book.

Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story by Evan I. Schwartz is well, just that. I first heard about this on NPR toward the beginning of the summer, and due to the library's insistence over fines, wound up reading two halves of this book about a month or so apart. The Wizard of Oz itself is so central to our early 21^st century culture, that the allure of discovering its origins was too much to pass up (incidently, both Megan and I were coming home very late that night and listened to the same story in each of our cars).

Finding Oz is as much a biography of Lyman Frank Baum as it is of the story itself. In short, Baum had been a late 19^th century jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none whose career began in western New York as a chicken farmer and veered to playwright, oilman (in New York and Pennsylvania), then a variety shop owner, publisher, journalist, sports manager, and essayist (in Dakota Territory), and writer/traveling salesman/journalist in Chicago. It was at the age of forty, with four sons, a wife, thousands of miles behind him, Frank Baum had failed at just about everything he'd done when he struck upon samadhi in the winter of 1898, and with a single pencil, scribbling on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper all over his house, created The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

For both Dorothy and Toto, the journey to, through, and from Oz is a transcendent and adventurous experience which ultimately reflected Baum's zigzagging across the cities and frontier of fin de siecile America. This journey indeed, is as much spiritual as it is literary and historical. While Baum's Oz is, at the end of the day, a children's story, it is filled with allusions and intended interpretations as a spiritual search for one's inner Self. What we know today as "New Age" religions aren't really as "new" as the name would imply, but in fact, have their roots in the writings and teachings in a late 1800s school of thought known as theosophy. What began as philosophical wanderings of a Helena Blavatsky fused ancient traditions of occultists, old religions (think pagans), and Eastern thought. Indeed, the American theosophical movement came to a head with the (unrelated and unplanned) arrival of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Worlds Fair (Columbian Exposition) Parliament of World's Religions, representing Hinduism (great and interesting sidestories about him too), which introduced to the West Hindu and Buddhist modes of thought.

Schwartz does a wonder job describing Baum's entrance to a metaphysical world was aided by his Matilda Joslyn Gage, his over-the-top (and historically overlooked), crazy-liberal feminist mother-in-law who hung out with likes of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Indeed, Matilda served as the archtype for both the Wicked and evil Witch of the West as well as the saintly, wise, and beautiful Good Witch of the North.

In a book which is a fine mixture of history, biography, philosophy, and literary criticism, Schwartz provides an engaging work which keeps the reader aware of both the beauty of the story as well as its deep, deep roots.

Most of our culture is an import. Throughout an American's childhood, we will find ourselves familiar with Little Red Riding Hood, King Arthur, Rumpelstiltskin, and Snow White, but The Wonderful Wizard of Oz's greatest contribution was the simple matter that it was the first (and perhaps only) thoroughly American fairy tale. Each component of this story sags with the weight of the closing of the frontier, capturing imaginations of the pioneer who was first terrified of the tornado, saw none by grey on the Kansan prairie, in the Exposition, was dazzled by the glimmer of an astounding city powered by power-mad wizards of science and industry, and sought to wash away the embodiment of their deepest fears.

While I know this description is not likely one of my best, this is certainly a good read