Dorothy Gale

Dorothy is introduced as a Kansas farm girl raised by Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz she is carried from Kansas to the Land of Oz when a tornado sweeps up her house along with her small black dog, Toto. In subsequent Oz books and stage adaptations Baum and later writers expand her biography: the surname Gale appears in Baum's 1902 stage script and is used in Ozma of Oz (1907). Dorothy continues to travel between Kansas and Oz by various magical means (tornado, later devices such as the Wish Way) and ultimately becomes a permanent resident and honored member of Oz society, made a princess by Ozma and living in the Emerald City in later volumes.

Baum's texts repeatedly identify Dorothy as a young Kansas girl frequently described wearing a blue-and-white gingham dress that becomes her trademark; the Munchkins admire the dress because blue is their preferred color and white is associated with good witches and sorceresses in the fiction. She is almost always accompanied by her small black dog, Toto; other animal companions appear in various books (e.g., Billina the hen, Eureka the kitten in some volumes). Cross-references within the extended Baum corpus and later continuations place Dorothy at approximately eleven years old when she comes to live in Oz, though Baum's earliest volumes give no explicit single age.

Dorothy is not presented as innately supernatural; she is a human child whose primary 'abilities' are character traits—courage, decisiveness, leadership, and quick action—that allow her to resolve crises in Oz. She interacts with and benefits from Oz's magic: the enchantments of Oz preserve her youth while she resides there, and she uses ordinary means in ways that exploit magical rules (for example, throwing water that fatally affects the Wicked Witch of the West because the witch has a water vulnerability). Her agency in organizing rescues, confronting threats, and cooperating with Oz personages is a recurring behavioral pattern in the novels.