The inventor of the ruby slippers and the scarecrow was no gentle dreamer. L. Frank Baum was a 19th-century tech bro, a dramatic theater kid, and a walking contradiction whose real life was wilder and darker than anything he wrote for Oz.

This deep dive peels back the curtain on the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, following him from an isolated, sickly childhood through a string of spectacular business collapses to literary immortality. It confronts both his genius and the deeply troubling editorials that stain his legacy, asking whether Oz accidentally captured the whole American experience.

• The fire that destroyed his theater during a play ironically titled Matches, establishing his lifelong pattern of grand ambition and ruin
• His explosive household with suffragist mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage and the feminis ...