The Yellow Brick Road and the Ruby Slippers

"Come along, Toto," she said.
"We will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again."
L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. Baum's career as a children's author began with the 1897 publication of Mother Goose in Prose. The book sold well, and Baum followed it in 1899 with the poetry collection Father Goose: His Book. Although Father Goose was the children's bestseller of the year, it was soon overshadowed by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The demand for additional stories about Dorothy and her friends was so great that Baum wrote thirteen more Oz books. Other fictional works created for boys and girls were published by Baum under the pen names "Floyd Akers" and "Edith Van Dyne." After Baum's death in 1919, a new generation of authors continued the Oz series as well as several of Baum's other story lines.