L. Frank Baum

Baum was a sickly boy with a private printing press, and then, in turn, an actor, a playwright, a breeder of prize poultry who published a serious manual on the Hamburg fowl, a failed shopkeeper on the Dakota prairie, a small-town newspaper editor, a travelling salesman, and the founder of a trade magazine about how to dress a shop window. He was forty-four when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz appeared in 1900 and made him famous.

What he set out to write, and said so in his preface, was an American fairy tale — one that kept the wonder and dropped the moralising and the horror that ran through the European ones. It worked well enough that he spent the rest of his life writing thirteen more Oz books, largely because readers refused to let him stop.

He also left something that no account of him should omit. Editing a newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in December 1890 and January 1891 — after the killing of Sitting Bull, and again after the massacre at Wounded Knee — he published two editorials arguing for the extermination of the remaining Native Americans. They are unambiguous, and they are his. His descendants have since apologised publicly for them.