Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

First edition cover
Author	L. Frank Baum
Illustrator	John R. Neill
Language	English
Series	The Oz books
Genre	Children's Literature
Publisher	Reilly & Britton
Publication date	1908
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Preceded by	Ozma of Oz
Followed by	The Road to Oz

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz is the fourth book set in the Land of Oz written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by John R. Neill. It was published on June 18, 1908 and reunites Dorothy Gale with the humbug Wizard from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). This is one of only two of the original fourteen Oz books to be illustrated with watercolor paintings.^[a] It was followed by The Road to Oz (1909).

Baum, having resigned himself to writing a series of Oz books, set up elements of this book in the prior Ozma of Oz (1907).^[1] He was not entirely pleased with this, as the introduction to Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz opens with the protest that he knows many tales of many lands, and hoped that children would permit him to tell them those tales.^[2]

Written shortly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and around the time Baum moved to California, the book starts with an earthquake in California. Dorothy and others are swallowed up by cracks in the earth, and fall into a cavern, where they begin their adventures.

Very little of the story—six of the twenty chapters—actually takes place in Oz.^[3] As in Ozma of Oz before it, and in some of the books after, Oz is not the land where the adventures take place, but the land the characters are seeking as a refuge from adventure.^[4]

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