Works similar to Peter Pan

Although the story of Peter Pan is certainly unique, it is not altogether without peers. It is a fantasy story about children, for children, and for adults. Although timeless, it is a product of its time.

The works it is most often associated with are two books by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – better know by his pen-name Lewis Carrol – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Published in 1865 and 1871, respectively, these were well-established classics of "recent" English literature by the time Barrie was writing, and he was no doubt familiar with them. Although they are very different places, Neverland undoubtedly owes some debt to Wonderland. Both stories have their roots in make-believe yarns told by their authors to children who were their friends rather than their offspring.

Historically, Peter and Wendy's Neverland is a closer cousin of Dorothy's Oz, first published in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz just two years before Barrie introduced his readers to Peter Pan. Both feature adolescent heroines carried through the air from their mundane homes to magical lands. Both were adapted to the fledgling medium of film before becoming blockbusters in the mid 20th century. One key difference is that Baum followed his first story with a dozen more, while Barrie merely continued to revise the one (while producing other unrelated works).

The children's books of A. A. Milne came later, but cover similar themes (e.g. childhood and growing up) and some real-world complications (e.g. the lifelong resentment of the boy whose name was given to the protagonist: Peter Llewelyn Davies and Christopher Robin Milne.

Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book is nearly contemporary with Barrie's Peter Pan works, and also features fantasy stories of a boy raised in the wild. They both suffer a bit from the imperial racism of the cultures in which they were written.

Tuck Everlasting is a fairly modern work (1975), but set in a similar time period to Peter and Wendy, in America. It also features an eternally young boy who befriends a regular girl, but this one is part of a family who are all unaging.

The pirates in Peter and Wendy (and pretty much every other fictional pirate since the late 19th century) were influenced by Treasure Island, by Barrie's penpal Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding is entirely different in tone, but shares a common subject of boys living alone on an island, and takes the idea of their lack of civilization to its extreme.