All 14 Oz Books in Order, Free to Read Online
Almost everyone has read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or seen the 1939 film, and stopped there. Baum wrote thirteen more, over twenty years, and they get stranger and better as they go — by the end he is building a country with a working geography, a standing cast of about forty, and rules about death that the film would not have known what to do with.
All fourteen are public domain and all fourteen are here. This is the order he wrote them in, which is also the order to read them.
The fourteen Baum novels
1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) — the one you know, and shorter and harsher than the film. Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch by accident, the Tin Woodman beheads a wildcat in chapter nine, and the shoes are silver. 2. The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) — no Dorothy. A boy called Tip escapes the witch Mombi with a pumpkin-headed man he has brought to life, and General Jinjur's all-girl army takes the Emerald City. Ends on a reveal that no other children's book of its decade would have printed. 3. Ozma of Oz (1907) — Dorothy returns via shipwreck, meets Billina the hen and Tik-Tok the clockwork man, and the Nome King begins a feud that runs through six more books. Most Oz readers name this the best of the series. 4. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) — an earthquake drops Dorothy into the underground countries. The Mangaboos, the Invisible Valley, and a long stretch that is genuinely frightening; the Wizard comes back as a real character rather than a fraud. 5. The Road to Oz (1909) — the loosest book in the series, a walking tour with the Shaggy Man, Button-Bright and Polychrome. Almost no plot, and the birthday party at the end pulls in every character Baum had ever written, including a cameo from Santa Claus. 6. The Emerald City of Oz (1910) — the Nome King tunnels under Oz to destroy it while Dorothy moves there for good with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Baum meant it as the last one, and it reads like a farewell. 7. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) — the return, and one of the strongest. Ojo the Unlucky needs a cure for two people turned to marble, and Scraps the patchwork girl is the funniest thing in Oz. 8. Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) — Betsy Bobbin, the Rose Kingdom, and the Nome King again. Adapted from a stage musical, which shows in the pacing. 9. The Scarecrow of Oz (1915) — Baum's own favourite. Trot and Cap'n Bill arrive from his non-Oz books, and the Scarecrow gets the closest thing he ever has to a hero's plot. 10. Rinkitink in Oz (1916) — barely an Oz book. Written years earlier as a separate novel and retrofitted, so Prince Inga's siege story runs almost to the end before Oz appears. Uneven and worth it for Bilbil the goat. 11. The Lost Princess of Oz (1917) — Ozma vanishes and every magical object in the country goes with her. The best-plotted book of the fourteen, structured as an actual search. 12. The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) — the Tin Woodman goes looking for the girl he was engaged to before he was tin, and finds out what happened to his original flesh. Baum's oddest premise and he follows it all the way down. 13. The Magic of Oz (1919) — a transformation word, a Munchkin boy with a grudge, and the Nome King's last attempt. 14. Glinda of Oz (1920) — published after Baum died, and noticeably darker: a sunken island, two warring peoples, and Ozma and Dorothy trapped underwater for most of the book.
Also: Little Wizard Stories of Oz, six very short stories written for younger readers, each pairing two of the regulars. A good way to try Oz on a five-year-old.
Where to stop if you are not reading all fourteen
If you want three, read 1, 3 and 11 — the original, the best, and the best-constructed. If you want five, add 2 for the reveal and 7 for Scraps.
Baum's other worlds
He was writing fantasy on a schedule and not all of it was Oz. These stand alone, and two of them feed characters into the series later.
- Sky Island — Trot and Cap'n Bill again, on an island in the air divided between the Blues and the Pinks. Politically the sharpest thing he wrote.
- The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus — a full mythology for Santa, from a foundling raised by immortals to the moment the Council of the Immortals votes him the Mantle of Immortality. Genuinely moving, and nothing like the rest of his work.
- A Kidnapped Santa Claus — a short story in the same world, in which the Daemons of the Caves take Santa on Christmas Eve.
- The Master Key — an "electrical fairy tale" from 1901 in which a boy accidentally summons the Demon of Electricity and is given three gifts a week. It predicts several things and gets several others gloriously wrong.
- The Enchanted Island of Yew — a fairy who becomes a knight for a year. The most conventional of his fantasies and the most swordfighting.
- The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo — pure nonsense, published before Oz, set in a valley where it rains lemonade.
- American Fairy Tales and Mother Goose in Prose — his two short-story collections. The second was his first book, and Maxfield Parrish illustrated it.
- Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville — Baum writing realist fiction for teenage girls under a pen name, which he did for years and nobody remembers.
All of it is free
Every book on this page is in the public domain and readable in your browser on BingeReaders — no download, no app, no account needed to start a chapter. Everything by him sits on two author pages, because the catalogue records his name two ways: L. Frank Baum and L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum.
If you want more of the same feeling: there are 13 books set in Oz, 37 fantasy classics and 127 books of fairy tales in the library, and our guide to free fairy tale collections covers the Grimms, Andersen and Lang.