The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
A girl and her dog are carried by a cyclone into a country of witches, munchkins and a wizard who turns out to be a man behind a screen. Baum wrote it as an American fairy tale, deliberately without the moralising of European children's books.
The book is fast, funny and surprisingly unsentimental. Its famous lesson, that the characters already had what they were looking for, is delivered without a lecture. The sequels are uneven, but the first book remains a model of how to write fantasy for children without condescension.
Public-domain status
First published in 1900. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; L. Frank Baum died in 1919, so this work has been free to republish there since 1990.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 55 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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