Dorothy Gale

Dorothy Gale is the fictional protagonist of many of the Oz novels by the American author L. Frank Baum. Her best friend is Oz's ruler Princess Ozma. Dorothy first appears in Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and reappears in most of its sequels. In addition, she is the main character in various adaptations, notably the classic 1939 movie adaptation of the book, The Wizard of Oz.

In later books, Oz steadily becomes more familiar to her than her homeland of Kansas. Indeed, Dorothy eventually goes to live in an apartment in the Emerald City's palace but only after her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have settled in a farmhouse on its outskirts, unable to pay the mortgage on their house in Kansas. Dorothy's best friend Princess Ozma, officially makes her a princess of Oz later in the book series.

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An influence on the creation of Dorothy appears to be the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. Although Baum reportedly found these plots incoherent, he identified their source of popularity as Alice herself, a character with whom child readers could identify; this influenced his choice of a protagonist for his own books.