The Land of Oz is a magical country introduced in the 1900 children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow.
Oz consists of four vast quadrants, the Gillikin Country in the north, Quadling Country in the south, Munchkin Country in the east, and Winkie Country in the west. Each province has its own ruler, but the realm itself has always been ruled by a single monarch. According to The Marvelous Land of Oz, this monarch is Princess Ozma.
Baum did not intend for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to have any sequels, but it achieved greater popularity than any of the other fairylands he created, including the land of Merryland in Baum's children's novel Dot and Tot in Merryland, written a year later. Due to Oz's worldwide success, Baum decided to return to it four years after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. For the next two decades, he described and expanded upon the land in the Oz Books, a series which introduced many fictional characters and creatures. Baum intended to end the series with the sixth Oz book The Emerald City of Oz (1910), in which Oz is forever sealed off and made invisible to the outside world, but this did not sit well with fans, and he quickly abandoned the idea, writing eight more successful Oz books, and even naming himself the "Royal Historian of Oz."
In all, Baum wrote fourteen best-selling children's books about Oz and its enchanted inhabitants, as well as a spin-off series of six early readers. After his death in 1919, author Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrator John R. Neill (who had previously collaborated with Baum on his Oz books) and several other writers and artists continued the series. There are now over 50 novels based upon Baum's original Oz saga.
Baum characterized Oz as a real place, unlike MGM's 1939 musical movie adaptation, which presents it as a dream of lead character Dorothy Gale. According to the Oz books, it is a hidden fairyland cut off from the rest of the world by the Deadly Desert.
A shorthand reference for a person living in Oz is "Ozite". The term appears in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, and The Emerald City of Oz. Elsewhere in the books, "Ozmie" is also used. In the animated 1974 semi-sequel to the MGM film, Journey Back to Oz, "Ozonian" is in the script. The term "Ozian" appears in the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage adaptation of the MGM movie and in the work Wicked. "Ozmite" was used in Reilly & Lee marketing in the 1920s, a fact which has suggested to some critics that "Ozmie" may have been a typographical error.
Characteristics
Oz is, in the first book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, distinguished from Dorothy's native Kansas by not being civilized; this explains why Kansas does not have witches and wizards, while Oz does. In the third book, Ozma of Oz, Oz is described as a "fairy country", new terminology that remained to explain its wonders.
Geography
The Land of Oz
Oz is roughly rectangular in shape, and divided along the diagonals into four countries: Munchkin Country (but commonly referred to as 'Munchkinland' in adaptations) in the East, Winkie Country in the West (sometimes West and East are reversed on maps of Oz, see West and East below), Gillikin Country in the North, and Quadling Country in the South. In the center of Oz, where the diagonals cross, is the fabled Emerald City, capital of the land of Oz and seat to the monarch of Oz, Princess Ozma.
The regions have a color scheme: blue for Munchkins, yellow for Winkies, red for Quadlings, green for the Emerald City, and (in works after the first) purple for the Gillikins, which region was also not named in the first book. This emphasis on color is in contrast with Kansas; Baum, describing it, used "gray" nine times in four paragraphs. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this is merely the favorite color, used for clothing and other man-made objects, and having some influence on their choice of crops, but the basic colors of the world are natural colors. The effect is less consistent in later works. In The Marvelous Land of Oz, the book states that everything in the land of the Gillikins is purple, including the plants and mud, and a character can see that he is leaving when the grass turns from purple to green, but it also describes pumpkins as orange and corn as green in that land. Baum, indeed, never used the color scheme consistently; in many books, he alluded to the colors to orient the characters and readers to their location, and then did not refer to it again. His most common technique was to depict the man-made articles and flowers as the color of the country, leaving leaves, grass, and fruit their natural colors.