There are fourteen Oz books by Baum, and this is what happens after Dorothy goes home

Almost everyone who knows Oz knows one book of it, and most of them do not know that it is one book of it. L. Frank Baum wrote fourteen, over twenty years, and kept writing them because children would not let him stop. The first one ends with a girl arriving home in her stocking feet. The other thirteen are about a country that carries on without her, acquires a permanent ruler, and turns out to be considerably stranger than the road she walked.

Mild spoilers below for the sequels, including who ends up ruling Oz and what becomes of the Wizard.

• ✅Fourteen Baum books, 1900 to 1920. He died in 1919, and the last two of them were published after his death.
• ✅Oz gets a queen, and it is not Dorothy. Princess Ozma arrives in book two, in disguise.
• ✅The Wizard comes back. He returns in book four, by accident, and stays for good.
• ✅There is a wind-up mechanical man in book three, thirteen years before the word “robot” existed.

The reason this comes as a surprise to so many people is a single line. Dorothy says there is no place like home in chapter four of the first book, to the Scarecrow, on the road, as an argument about why anyone would want to leave a beautiful country for a grey one. The film moved it to the ending and made it a spell. In the novel it is a defence of Kansas offered halfway through the journey, and nothing about it closes anything.

📚 How many Oz books are there?

Fourteen by Baum, published between 1900 and 1920, and forty in the canonical series once his successors are counted. Baum died in May 1919, and the last two, The Magic of Oz and Glinda of Oz, both appeared after his death, the final one in July 1920.

What happened next is the unusual part. His publisher kept the series going with new writers under the standing title of Royal Historian of Oz, and Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen of them, five more than Baum himself, between 1921 and 1939. John R. Neill, who had illustrated the books since the second one, wrote three. Jack Snow, Rachel Cosgrove Payes and finally a mother-and-daughter pair took it to the fortieth volume in 1963, which collectors still call the Famous Forty.

Sixty-three years of continuous publication from one 1900 children's book is a strange achievement, and it happened because Baum kept trying to end it and failing. The clearest attempt is the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), which he wrote as a finale. Dorothy leaves Kansas for good, taking Aunt Em and Uncle Henry with her, and Glinda closes the book by cutting Oz off from the outside world altogether, so that no more stories can get out of it.

He then wrote eight more. The barrier is worked around by the next book and the series runs on to 1920, which tells you something about the relationship between an author and a series that pays for his house. It also means the emotional ending most readers assume, the girl returning to the grey farm, was reversed by Baum himself ten years later: he moved her, her aunt and her uncle permanently into the fairy country and let the farm go.

The playable version is book one, all twenty-four chapters of it, and the last doorway is the one where Glinda finally explains the shoes. Role-play The Wonderful Wizard of Oz →

👑 Who is Princess Ozma?

Ozma is the rightful ruler of Oz and the character the series actually belongs to. She is introduced in the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), and for almost all of it the reader knows her as Tip, a boy running away from a witch who has been keeping him. The reveal at the end is that Tip is Ozma, enchanted into another body as an infant so she could be hidden, and the enchantment is undone on the last pages.

From book three onwards she is the fixed point of the entire series. Dorothy comes and goes, eventually moving to Oz permanently with her aunt and uncle. The Wizard comes back and takes a junior position. Ozma stays, holds the throne, and is the person every later plot has to get to or protect. If you have only read the first book, the shape of the series is: the country you visited was between governments, and it found a real one two books later.

Baum did leave the succession organised at the end of the first book, which is the part readers of only that volume tend to forget. Glinda distributes three countries in a single conversation.

“I will return to the Emerald City,” he replied, “for Oz has made me its ruler and the people like me.”

The Scarecrow governs the Emerald City. The Tin Woodman goes west to rule the Winkies, who had asked for him after the Witch died. The Lion returns to a forest whose animals have already made him king. A stuffed man, a tin man and a lion end the book as heads of state.

The second novel then takes one of those thrones straight back. The Scarecrow is deposed by an Army of Revolt: a company of girls under a General Jinjur, armed with knitting needles worn in their hair, who take the Emerald City without a single casualty on either side. It is 1904, sixteen years before American women could vote nationally, and the coup is played as farce and as prophecy at once. Ozma arrives at the end of that book to take the throne on better grounds than either of them.

🎈 What happens to the Wizard after book one?

He comes back in the fourth book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), and Baum arranges the reunion as a joke at his expense. Dorothy falls into a crevice opened by a California earthquake. The Wizard, whose balloon has vented its gas and will not rise, falls into the same one. He arrives not as a rescuer but as a second person in the hole, with exactly the same problem and a suitcase of stage tricks.

Nobody magics them out. Dorothy signals Ozma, and Ozma lifts the whole party clear with the Magic Belt, the Wizard included. The man who once ran a country on the strength of a paper head is retrieved by a teenage queen, and the series never lets him forget the order those two things happened in.

What follows is quietly the best character arc Baum wrote. The humbug who governed on paper heads and a ball of cotton is invited to stay, and by 1913 another character mentions in passing that he has been taking lessons from Glinda and is now her assistant. The fraud gets an apprenticeship. He never becomes the most powerful person in any room he is in, and the books stop treating that as a failure and start treating it as a job.

⚙️ Is Tik-Tok an early robot?

Yes, and by a wide margin. Tik-Tok, a round copper mechanical man who has to be wound up separately for thinking, speaking and moving, and who stops mid-sentence when a spring runs down, appears in the third book, Ozma of Oz, in 1907. He is not magic and he is not alive. He is machinery that does a person's job, which is the whole idea.

The word for what he is did not exist yet. “Robot” was coined by the Czech writer Karel Čapek for his play R.U.R., written in 1920 and first performed in 1921, reaching English in 1923. Tik-Tok predates the vocabulary by more than a decade, which is why he keeps turning up in histories of the idea.

He is also very funny about it, in a way later robot fiction took another fifty years to arrive at. Tik-Tok is scrupulously honest, points out that he cannot be blamed for anything because he only does what he is wound to do, and is perfectly content to be left switched off in a cupboard until someone needs him. Baum gets to the ethics of the machine servant three years after Ozma took the throne, in a book for children, without appearing to notice he is doing it.

There is a reason the series keeps producing characters like him. Baum was writing during the electrification of American cities, and the books are full of machinery treated as ordinary company: a clockwork man, a sawhorse brought to life, a flying sofa built out of two couches and a palm frond. Where later fantasy tends to set magic against technology, Baum files them in the same drawer, and a wind-up servant with a wound-down voice is no stranger in Oz than a witch is.

All of which is the case for playing book one properly rather than skimming it. It is the only volume where Oz has no legitimate ruler, where the Wizard is still a fraud in good standing, and where nobody has yet worked out what the silver shoes do.

The first book is free at Project Gutenberg, as are all fourteen. If you came here from the film, start with what the 1939 movie changed.