At the turn of the century when children’s literature was rife with moral lessons and cautionary violence, L. Frank Baum set about writing a great American children’s story, free from the cumbersome morality of the time.
Inspiration was all around him – biographers and critics have identified everyone and everything from his mother-in-law to Castle Park in Michigan as reincarnated in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Dorothy was named after a real child, the deceased baby niece of Baum and his wife Maud Gage. But it took an entire century for the inspiration of the Wizard himself to be identified – Washington Harrison Donaldson, balloonist and colleague of famed circus master P.T. Barnum.
