Yellow brick road
Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion, while traveling on the Yellow Brick Road.
The Oz series
Creator	L. Frank Baum
Genre	Children's books
Type	Yellow road, leading to Emerald City
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The road of yellow brick is an element in the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, with additional such roads appearing in The Marvelous Land of Oz and The Patchwork Girl of Oz. The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, based on the novel, gave it the name by which it is better known, the yellow-brick road (it is never referenced by that title in the original novel). In both novel and film, it is the path that Dorothy is instructed to follow from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City in order to seek the aid of the Wizard of Oz.

In the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead likewise follow a yellow-brick road to reach the Emerald City.^[1]

In the book The Patchwork Girl of Oz, it is revealed that there are two yellow brick roads from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City: according to the Shaggy Man, Dorothy Gale took the harder one in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.^[1]

The Yellow Brick Road's spiral origins in the 1939 film

In the 1939 film, a red brick road is seen to originate at the same point as the yellow brick road in the center of Munchkinland, heading off in a different direction. Also, at the cornfield where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, there is an intersection of yellow brick roads. Dorothy and Scarecrow decide which of the three branches to take, and eventually find themselves at the Emerald City.

In the 1985 semi-sequel Return to Oz, Dorothy finds the yellow brick road in ruins at the hands of the evil Nome King.

Stage Craft Details: The Yellow Brick Road was painted/Polished by Keith Major Anderson

[edit] See also

• Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• Dighe, Ranjit S. ed. The Historian's Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory (2002)
• Hearn, Michael Patrick (ed). (2000, 1973) The Annotated Wizard of Oz. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-04992-2
• Ritter, Gretchen. "Silver slippers and a golden cap: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and historical memory in American politics." Journal of American Studies (August 1997) vol. 31, no. 2, 171-203. online at JSTOR
• Rockoff, Hugh. "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a Monetary Allegory," Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990): 739-60 online at JSTOR