Baum's lost works make up a significant portion of his lifetime literary output. For a major American writer of the early twentieth century, a surprising number of works by L. Frank Baum have not survived. A list without pretensions to completeness can include:
Novels
- Johnson (1912)
- Our Married Life (1912)
- The Mystery of Bonita (1914)
- Molly Oodle (1915)
Short stories
- "How Scroggs Won the Reward" (1897)
- "Mr. Rumple's Chill" (1904?)
- "Bess of the Movies" (1904?)
(Two Baum stories, "The Diamondback" and "The Littlest Giant," were unpublished in his lifetime and survived in his papers, but missing their first pages.)
Dramas
Most of Baum's early dramas were destroyed in a fire. He wrote many plays and musical adaptations, sometimes with collaborators, that were never produced onstage. Some of these were never completed. Some exist in complete (The Girl from Oz) or incomplete form (The Maid of Athens, The Pipes o' Pan, etc.). Others have entirely disappeared.
- The Mackrummins (1882)
- Matches (1882)
- Kilmourne, or O'Connor's Dream (1883)
- The Queen of Killarney (1883)
- King Midas (1901)
- Peter and Paul (c. 1905?)
- The Clock Shop (c. 1910)
- The Pea-Green Poodle (c. 1910)
- The Girl of Tomorrow (c. 1912)
- Stagecraft (1914)
- The Uplifters' Minstrels (1916)
- The Orpheus Road Show (1917)
Some of Baum's lost plays may survive under alternative titles. Baum and Paul Tietjens worked on a King Midas in 1901, which might later have evolved into their Pipes o' Pan. The Girl of Tomorrow might have been a later revision of The Girl from Oz. Other uncertainties and confusions abound in Baum's dramatic efforts.