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- The plays of L. Frank Baum are an important aspect of Baum's writing career about which some of the least is known. While even most brief biographies, long before the Internet, have noted Baum's work as a playwright, these works have been rarely performed beyond his lifetime, and almost none have been published aside from two scenarios and a first act of three unfinished works in The Musical Fantasies of L. Frank Baum, compiled with an introduction by Alla T. Ford. Aside from his youthful success with The Maid of Arran, his blockbuster eight-year run with The Wizard of Oz, his failure with The Woggle-Bug, and The Tik-Tok Man of Oz as source material for his novel, Tik-Tok of Oz, very little is known about his dramatic output, and mostly from the publications of Michael Patrick Hearn, , and . Hearn identifies 41 different titles in the bibliography of the 2000 edition of The Annotated Wizard of Oz, plus one play without a title, although some of these titles clearly refer to drafts of the same play, such as the early titles of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz. One of the most contentious works is The Whatnexters (1903). Michael Patrick Hearn listed it under the plays in The Annotated Wizard of Oz (2000). Katharine M. Rogers takes this citation and suggests that this is "one of Baum's little jokes" and that the play never actually existed. In fact, Hearn's source is The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime, which refers to it as the "first chapter of an unfinished book" by Baum and Isidore Witmark. Rogers cites an article by Russel P. MacFall in the Winter 1982 issue of The Baum Bugle that exemplifies the estranged Frank Joslyn Baum not knowing what he is talking about. His biography of L. Frank Baum, was written after being estranged from his mother, and contains numerous made up details. (en)
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| rdfs:comment
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- The plays of L. Frank Baum are an important aspect of Baum's writing career about which some of the least is known. While even most brief biographies, long before the Internet, have noted Baum's work as a playwright, these works have been rarely performed beyond his lifetime, and almost none have been published aside from two scenarios and a first act of three unfinished works in The Musical Fantasies of L. Frank Baum, compiled with an introduction by Alla T. Ford. Aside from his youthful success with The Maid of Arran, his blockbuster eight-year run with The Wizard of Oz, his failure with The Woggle-Bug, and The Tik-Tok Man of Oz as source material for his novel, Tik-Tok of Oz, very little is known about his dramatic output, and mostly from the publications of Michael Patrick Hearn, , and (en)
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