L. Frank Baum

MASONIC BIOGRAPHIES

FAMOUS FREEMASONS

L. Frank Baum

May 15, 1856- May 5, 1919

Author Lyman Frank Baum, with illustrator William Wallace Denslow, produced The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1902. With Paul Tietjens and Julien Mitchell he produced a stage version that ran for 293 nights on Broadway and then toured the USA from 1902 to 1911. The first of many sequels, The Marvelous Land of Oz was published in 1904. Moving to Hollywood in 1908, in 1914 Baum formed the unsuccessful Oz Film Manufacturing Company. His last book, Glinda of Oz, was posthumously published in 1920.

Baum joined the Ramayan Theosophical Society in Chicago on September 4, 1892, having written in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer for January 25, 1890 that Theosophists were "seekers of truth" who believed "God is Nature and Nature God." Although Christian fundamentalists who view the Oz stories as satanic have claimed Baum was a freemason, there is no record of this.

There is a record though, of Baum’s opinion of freemason Palmer Cox’s Brownies: they didn't belong in Oz.

Non-mason

Source: The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Michael Patrick Hearn. New York : W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 1973, 2000.

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