The Road to Oz
core novel 1909 Oz
Record
| First published | 1909 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.71 (13,834 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781782260974 |
| Internal chronology | 5 |
Synopsis
In The Road to Oz, Dorothy meets a friendly wandering hobo known as the Shaggy Man on her family's Kansas farm and agrees to show him the way to the nearest town. Along the route, however, they come to a mysterious seventh crossroad that separates them entirely from the ordinary world, sweeping them into a series of increasingly strange lands. Joined by the odd, absent-minded boy Button-Bright and Polychrome, the whimsical daughter of the rainbow, the growing party journeys through Oz's stranger outer regions, encountering unusual inhabitants and obstacles as they make their way toward the Emerald City, where a grand celebration awaits them at their destination.
Where it sits
- Universe: Oz
- Series: The Oz Books core; position 5 of 14 in the series' recorded order
- Author: L. Frank Baum
Notes
- From the series record (The Oz Books): L. Frank Baum's own 14 Oz novels, one continuous author-written saga (1900-1920, the last published posthumously a year after his 1919 death). Registered per the credited-authorship-as-bright-line precedent: Core Canon = Baum's own 14 novels only. Ruth Plumly Thompson (and, later, John R. Neill, Jack Snow, and others) continued the series with an officially licensed further ~26 'Famous Forty' Oz books after Baum's death -- explicitly out of scope (a sprawling multi-author catalogue to register in a later pass rather than all at once); logged as a future candidate for a later pass. No formal literary award existed for children's fantasy in this era; this project's genre-historical-significance precedent (King of Elfland's Daughter, The Worm Ouroboros, Lud-in-the-Mist) applies -- Oz is a foundational work of American fantasy, adapted into the 1902 Broadway musical and the 1939 MGM film.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Oz Books: position 5 of 14: previous Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) · next The Emerald City of Oz (1910)
Sources
- Wikipedia: List of Oz books
- FantasticFiction: L. Frank Baum's Oz books in order
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Oz
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.