L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and Dorothy Gale has been walking the Yellow Brick Road ever since. She is a Kansas farm girl swept to a magical land by a tornado, and her only desire is to go home. The ruby slippers could have taken her there immediately. Glinda the Good Witch knew this. She did not tell Dorothy because, as she explains at the end, Dorothy would not have believed it. She needed to learn it for herself, which is either the wisest or the cruelest pedagogical decision in children's literature.

Dr. Alissa Burger of Culver-Stockton College, in her study of the Oz cultural landscape, has argued that Dorothy's journey is the foundational American quest narrative: a person from the ordinary world enters the extraordinary, discovers that the extraordinary is populated by people who each lack one thing they desperately need, and realizes that what she was looking for was where she started. The Scarecrow wants a brain he already uses. The Tin Man wants a heart he already has. The Lion wants courage he already demonstrates. Dorothy wants home, and home was always a pair of shoes she was wearing the whole time.

The Man Behind the Curtain

The Wizard of Oz is a fraud. He is a carnival huckster from Omaha operating a machine designed to create the impression of power he does not have. Baum's decision to make the authority figure a con artist is the most subversive element of the story. Every institution Dorothy encounters, the Wizard, the witch, even Glinda's withholding of information, operates through deception. The only genuine things in Oz are the relationships Dorothy builds on the road.

There Is No Place Like Home

Dorothy's final declaration is the most analyzed line in American children's literature. There is no place like home. Baum meant it sincerely: Kansas, with its gray prairies and hard work, is where Dorothy belongs. But the film version, with its sepia-toned Kansas and Technicolor Oz, complicates the statement. Home is gray. Oz is vivid. And Dorothy chooses gray, which is either a mature acceptance of reality or a retreat from wonder, and the ambiguity is what keeps the story alive a century later.