The Scarecrow of Oz
core novel 1915 Oz
Record
| First published | 1915 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.76 (7,273 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781782261018 |
| Internal chronology | 9 |
Synopsis
In The Scarecrow of Oz, a sailor named Cap'n Bill and a young girl named Trot are caught in a freak whirlpool that transports them from the ordinary world into a series of magical lands connected to Oz. Their travels eventually bring them to the isolated realm of Jinxland, cut off from the rest of Oz by a barrier of high cliffs, where they find a tyrannical king and a vengeful witch conspiring against a rightful princess who stands to lose her claim to the throne. As Cap'n Bill and Trot become entangled in Jinxland's political troubles, word of the crisis eventually reaches the Scarecrow, who sets out to intervene on the princess's behalf.
Where it sits
- Universe: Oz
- Series: The Oz Books core; position 9 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 9 of 14: previous Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) · next Rinkitink in Oz (1916)
Sources
- Wikipedia: List of Oz books
- FantasticFiction: L. Frank Baum's Oz books in order
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarecrow_of_Oz
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.