Ruth Plumly Thompson was an American writer of children's stories, best known for writing many novels placed in Oz, the fictional land of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels.
She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began her writing career in 1914 when she took a job at a newspaper. She had already published her first children's book, The Perhappsy Chaps, and her second, The Princess of Cozytown, was pending publication when William Lee, vice president of Baum's publisher Reilly & Lee, solicited Thompson to continue the Oz series. Between 1921 and 1939, she wrote one Oz book a year.
Her contributions to the Oz series are lively and imaginative, featuring a wide range of colorful and unusual characters. Typically in each of Thompson's Oz novels, a child (usually from America) and a supernatural companion (usually a talking animal), while traveling through Oz or one of the neighboring regions, find themselves in an obscure community where the inhabitants engage in a single activity. The inhabitants of this community then capture the travelers, and force them to participate in this same activity. While Baum's child protagonists tended to be little girls, Thompson's were boys. She emphasized humor to a greater extent than Baum did, and always considered her work for children.
(source: wikipedia)