Johna Rea Neill (1877-1943)
Today most known as illustrator of Wizard of Oz Series, he illustrated many other books and he did even more in the field of newspapers and magazines. Anyway, Baum's Oz will be the thing Neill will be remembered by, so it is only fair to present him with one of illustrations from there.
Here we go with The Scarecrow of Oz, 1915 edition from The Reilly & Britton Co.:
O.k., I don't intent to write biography of John R. Neill so, I will drop just few quick facts about him:
- he was the fifth of eight children, he lost his father when he was seven, he was married twice, he had three daughters and died from heart condition,
- Baum asked Neill to illustrate the series about Oz, after W. W. Denslow, illustrator of the first book in the series got into disagreement with Baum, Neill was so loaded with other work initially didn't want to take this burden, but after several meeting he agreed and in his lifetime illustrated 13 books and 6 short stories written by Frank Baum, 19 books written by Ruth Plumly Thompson and finally three written by himself,
- although he worked for dozens of magazines, Neill apparently didn't consider himself as illustrator, because he invested most of his earnings in real estate and he even described himself as self employed in the field of real estate, where he never became rich as Denslow who for some time owned an island and crowned himself as a king (Denslow's wealth didn't last forever neither), so in the late years Neill started to write for pulp magazines which were not so dependent on commercials as newspapers.
I hope you enjoyed in this part of literary history made by John R. Neill, 'The Royal illustrator of Oz"!
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