Long before Dorothy followed the Yellow Brick Road across movie screens, a young composer was trying to turn L. Frank Baum’s fantastical world into something audiences could experience from a theater seat. Laura C. Rader’s The Lark looks behind the cultural legacy of The Wizard of Oz to Paul Tietjens, whose collaboration with Baum brought Oz to the Broadway stage decades before the 1939 film. Inspired by Tietjens’ 1901 diary, the novel follows an ambitious musician caught between artistic opportunity, family obligation, and a love that could jeopardize the future he is working to create.

Historical Fiction

Date Published: 09-23-2026

Publisher: Echoes Publishing

At the turn of the century, twenty-three-year-old Paul Tietjens is a gifted classical pianist with dreams of greatness and a non-refundable ticket to Europe to study with the master composers of his time.

But when the bank calls in the debt on his family’s Missouri farm, Paul forgoes his dream to save them from financial ruin. Desperate to find a new road to success, he moves to up-and-coming Chicago, where he persuades author L. Frank Baum to collaborate on a comic opera of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, setting the stage for the defining cultural touchstone that we know today.

Paul embarks on his opera with high hopes, but scandal threatens his soaring ambition when he falls in love with his best friend’s beautiful but married sister, and his fears grow as the Wizard of Oz demands not only his talent but his soul.

Inspired by Paul’s 1901 diary, The Lark follows Paul as he journeys from the theaters of Chicago to the streets of Manhattan, from his family’s Missouri farm to the beaches of Michigan, fighting to hang onto the chance of a lifetime, his integrity, and the woman he loves.

The Lark turns its attention to a chapter of Oz history that is easily overshadowed by the famous film that followed. Paul Tietjens enters the story not as a distant historical name but as a twenty-three-year-old musician facing an immediate choice between the European education he has planned and the financial crisis threatening his family’s Missouri farm. From there, his collaboration with L. Frank Baum places personal ambition alongside the uncertain work of creating a theatrical production that would become part of the larger Oz legacy.

Rader also has an unusually personal historical source to draw upon: Paul’s 1901 diary. That connection gives the novel a compelling framework for exploring the man alongside the milestone. Chicago theaters, Manhattan streets, family responsibilities, artistic ambition, and Paul’s relationship with a married woman all converge during a period when the future attached to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was not yet assured. Readers already familiar with Oz can therefore approach its history from a less familiar direction, while the novel’s conflicts remain rooted in the choices of the young composer helping to bring it to the stage.

From Chapter 27 of The Lark by Laura C. Rader

After lunch, I sat at the parlor piano and ran through some of the songs for The Wizard of Oz, replaying each moment with Katherine in my mind as my fingers played the keys. She sat nearby, silently reading Persuasion, our glances meeting now and again as Daisy played with Lina and Vita in between sorting through the boarding house accounts. I mulled over the sanctity of marriage, the frailties of the heart, and the ominous predictions of the palm reader. My fate was surely sealed, and I only prayed I hadn’t somehow thrown Katherine’s completely off course.

The Lark has a natural place on the reading list of historical-fiction readers who enjoy finding the lesser-known people behind familiar cultural landmarks. Anyone fascinated by The Wizard of Oz will encounter its history before Hollywood made Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion cinematic icons, with the focus instead on Paul Tietjens and the difficult path toward bringing Baum’s story to the stage.

The novel should also appeal to readers interested in turn-of-the-century Chicago and New York, theater and music history, historical figures reconstructed through surviving personal records, and protagonists forced to weigh ambition against responsibility. Paul’s artistic aspirations are further complicated by his feelings for his best friend’s married sister, adding a personal conflict in which professional success, integrity, family loyalty, and love are all capable of demanding something from him at the same time.

In addition to The Lark, Laura C. Rader is the award-winning author of the historical novel Hatfield 1677, based on the lives of her ancestors in Hatfield, Massachusetts, in the seventeenth century.

When she isn’t writing, you can find her researching history for her books and her family tree and spending time with family, friends, and pets.

A native of southern California, she now lives north of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Please go to www.lcrwriter.com for more info on her books or to subscribe to her newsletter.

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Knowing what The Wizard of Oz eventually became makes Paul Tietjens’ position in The Lark especially interesting. For Paul, there is no legendary film waiting safely in the future and no certainty that his collaboration with L. Frank Baum will become part of an enduring cultural phenomenon. There is only an ambitious young musician trying to seize an opportunity while obligations to his family, his feelings for Katherine, and the demands of the production complicate every step forward.

Rader’s use of Paul’s 1901 diary gives this familiar piece of American cultural history a distinctly personal point of entry. Instead of beginning with Oz as an established icon, The Lark returns to a moment when its theatrical future still depended upon artists making difficult choices behind the scenes. That perspective offers an intriguing reason to look again at a story generations know—and at one of the people who helped carry it toward the stage.

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