A hundred years ago, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, was published by the soon-to-be-defunct Chicago-based firm of George M. Hill. The Library of Congress is hosting a commemorative exhibition, and Norton has brought out a centennial edition of “The Annotated Wizard of Oz,” edited and annotated by Michael Patrick Hearn ($39.95). Hearn, we learn from a preface by Martin Gardner, became a Baum expert while he was an English major at Bard College, and put forward an annotated “Wizard” when he was only twenty years old. Gardner, the polymathic compiler of “The Annotated Alice” (1960) and “More Annotated Alice” (1990), had been invited to do the same, in 1970, for Baum’s fable; disclaiming competence, he recommended the young Bard Baumist to Clarkson N. Potter, who published Hearn’s tome in 1973. In the years since, Hearn has produced annotated versions of Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” added to the vast tracts of Baum scholarship, co-authored a biography of W. W. Denslow, the “Wizard” ’s illustrator, and labored at a still unpublished “definitive biography” of Baum. Presumably, he and Norton have been patiently waiting, with fresh slews of annotation and illustration, for the centennial (which is also that of Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” Colette’s first Claudine novel, and Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”) to roll around.

It is not hard to imagine why Gardner ducked the original assignment. The two “Alice” books are more literate, intricate, and modernist than Baum’s “Wonderful Wizard,” and Lewis Carroll’s mind, laden with mathematical lore, chess moves, semantic puzzles, and the riddles of Victorian religion, was more susceptible to explication, at least by the like-minded Gardner. But Baum, Hearn shows in his introduction, was a complicated character, too—a Theosophist, an expert on poultry, a stagestruck actor and singer, a fine amateur photographer, an inventive household tinkerer, a travelling china salesman, and, only by a final shift, a children’s writer. He was forty-four when “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was published. His prior bibliography included a directory of stamp dealers, a treatise on the mating and management of Hamburg chickens, a definitive work entitled “The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors” (also celebrating its centennial), and a few small volumes for children. Baum’s life (1856-1919) reflects the economic and ideological adventurism of his America. Hearn tells us that his father, Benjamin Ward Baum, “followed nearly as many careers as his son would. He was building a barrel factory in Chittenango [New York] when the boy was born, but made a fortune in the infant Pennsylvania oil industry only a few years later.” Lyman Frank, one of nine children, of whom five survived into adulthood, was raised on a luxurious estate in Syracuse and educated by English tutors. He was a dreamy reader of a boy. He lasted only two years at Peekskill Military School, and went on to Syracuse Classical School, without, apparently, graduating. He married the twenty-year-old Maud Gage when he was twenty-six and, grown into a lanky man with a large mustache, was touring as the star of a musical melodrama, “The Maid of Arran,” which he had written—book, lyrics, and music. His mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a prominent feminist and a keen Theosophist; she had not wanted her daughter to leave Cornell to marry an actor. But Maud did anyway, and when she became pregnant Frank left the theatre. With his uncle, Adam Baum, he established Baum’s Castorine Company, marketing an axle grease invented by his brother Benjamin and still, in this slippery world, being manufactured.

Maud’s sisters and brother had all settled in the Dakota Territory; in 1888 Frank moved with his family to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he opened a variety store, Baum’s Bazaar. Drought and depression caused the store to fail; in 1890 Baum took over a weekly newspaper, calling it the Saturday Pioneer, and by 1891 it, too, was failing. He found employment in Chicago, first as a reporter and then as a travelling salesman with the wholesale china-and-glassware firm of Pitkin & Brooks. The two-and-a-half-year Dakota interval gave him, however, the Plains flavor crucial to the myth of Dorothy and the Wizard; gray desolation and hardscrabble rural survival compose the negative of which Oz is the colorful print. In Baum’s Kansas, “even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” Chicago’s spectacular White City, built of plaster and cement for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on the lakeside marshes, gave both Baum and his illustrator, Denslow, the glitz and scale, but not the tint, of Oz’s Emerald City. A contemporary writer, Frances Hodgson Burnett, likened the White City to the City Beautiful in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and wrote:

Endless chains of jewels seemed strung and wound about it. The Palace of Flowers held up a great crystal of light glowing against the dark blue of the sky, towers and domes were crowned and diademed, thousands of jewels hung among the masses of leaves, or reflected themselves, sparkling in the darkness of the lagoons, fountains of molten jewels sprung up, and flamed and changed.