Lotus Land - Los Angeles in the Twenties

In February 1904 the famous children's writer Lyman Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), made a winter visit with his wife Maud to Southern California. Escaping the sub-zero temperatures of Chicago, the couple sojourned at Coronado in the early part of the month before proceeding southwards from San Diego to Pasadena and Santa Barbara. Enchanted by the sunshine, the blue of the Pacific, the magical landscape of fruit and flowers, the rambling Hotel del Coronado, itself a kind of self-contained enchanted city by the sea, the Baums returned to Coronado for the next six winters, with the exception of the winter of 1906, which they spent in Egypt and on the Continent. In 1910 the Baums and their four sons settled permanently in Hollywood. While staying at the Hotel del Coronado in 1904, Baum resumed, somewhat reluctantly, the Oz narrative which had met with such success four years earlier; The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) was the second of the fourteen Oz stories Baum would produce before his death in 1919, and all save the first were written at either Coronado or Hollywood.