Our Landlady

L. Frank Baum is internationally loved for his series of books about the wonderful Land of Oz. From January 1890 to February 1891 Baum wrote a column entitled "Our Landlady" that ran regularly in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. In all, he wrote forty-eight installments, each treating with practiced naiveti the problems facing the brand-new state of South Dakota. Through his fictional landlady, Sairy Ann Bilkins, Baum commented on drought, railroads, suffrage, prairie populism, the Ghost Dance Movement, prohibition, and dozens of other matters. Together, the "Our Landlady" columns constitute a satirical history of South Dakota's troubled first year. Baum's genius as a fiction writer can be clearly seen in four of his recurring characters. Mrs. Bilkins runs for mayor, alternately feeds and starves her boarders, and keeps track of everybody else's business. She harbors a secret passion for one of her boarders, the cigar-smoking Colonel. She nags Tom, the clerk who habitually fails to pay his rent. She chides the Doctor about the flimflammery of American medicine. Thirteen of the columns were collected in a 1941 South Dakota Writers' Project pamphlet, but Nancy Tystad Koupal provides the first complete edition and the first to include adequate information about the time, place, slang, and circumstances necessary for bringing the characters back to life. Koupal, a long-time student of Baum, has written numerous articles on Baum for journals such as the Great Plains Quarterly. She is the director of the Research and Publishing Program of the South Dakota State Historical Society.