J. K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter - Softcover

Shapiro, Marc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312376979 ISBN 13: 9780312376970

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2007

Synopsis

The heartwarming story behind J.K. Rowling's rise to fame―and the answers to Harry Potter fans' most burning questions!

Harry Potter is loved throughout the world, and so is his creator. Joanne Kathleen (J.K.) Rowling is a true wizard, a woman who has the ability to recall vividly her days as a child and capture those wild, wonderful, difficult times―an ability that helps make her creation, Harry Potter, seem so real.

In this revealing book, fans of the Harry Potter series will get to see their favorite author as they never have before. From a child with a wonderful imagination who didn't quite fit in, to a single mother with almost overwhelming responsibilities, J.K. Rowling and her story provide a wonderful chance for adults and children to enjoy a heartwarming, magical story. . . together.

Inside are the answer to some of the most frequently asked questions:
* Where did the idea for the Harry Potter series come from?
* How the birth of her third child impacted her life
* What's the latest on the top secret writing projects that will follow HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS?
* What re Joanne's feelings about the Harry Potter saga finally ending?
*Which of the characters does J.K most identify with?
*What is J.K. Rowling's simple rule about writing?
*And much more!

About this title

About the Author:

Marc Shapiro is the New York Times bestselling author of Justin Bieber: The Fever! and many other bestselling celebrity biographies. He has been a freelance entertainment journalist for more than twenty-five years, covering film, television and music for a number of national and international newspapers and magazines.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
WILD ABOUT HARRY
Sometimes the real world can be a confusing place. It is not always fair or kind. And in the real world there are not always happy endings. Which is why, every once in a while, we like to escape into the world of fantasy—a place where things always go our way and there is always a happy ending.
We want to believe in fantastic creatures in imaginary lands. We want to believe in magic powers, good friends, and the power of good to triumph over evil. We all fantasize about being able to fly and lift buildings off the ground. And how good a magic sword would feel in our hand as we go off to slay a dragon or win the hand of a beautiful princess.
Which is why we like Superman, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, and the amazing adventures of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. And it is why we are all now Potterites who can’t wait for the further adventures of our favorite wizard, Harry Potter, a thirteen-year-old English orphan who attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and tries to be a normal boy while confronting the truly fantastic at every turn.
The author of the Harry Potter books, J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling, is a grown woman with a child of her own. She is sensible, modest, and realistic—all good qualities when it comes to being a good parent and a positive member of the real world. She likes to walk the streets of her hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland. She will sit for hours at her favorite café, sipping an espresso and watching as the world passes her by.
But there is something that sets J. K. Rowling apart from the rest of us. For Joanne Kathleen Rowling likes to dream at all hours of the day and night. She dreams of faraway lands, bigger-than-life good guys, truly evil bad guys, and likable young children who try and make sense of it all. But unlike others, she turns her dreams into reality when she sits down with pen and paper and begins to write about the adventures of Harry Potter.
A smile crosses her face. Her already expressive eyes, framed by long wavy hair, grow even wider. Her pen slashes across the paper like a lightning bolt. In her mind, a door to a delightful new world of imagination and wonder has just opened wide and she is about to pass through it.
When J. K. Rowling sits down to give new life to Harry Potter, usually in her favorite writing place, a café called Nicholson’s, a change comes over the author. Because to create the latest adventure of Harry, his good friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and their adventures, Joanne has to stop being an adult and become a child who also wants to believe in the unbelievable.
And once Joanne becomes that child, almost anything can and does happen.
From the opening passages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we can sense that something quite out of the ordinary is up. Our introduction to Harry is not a happy one. He is an orphan who has been living for ten years in a closet under the stairs of his cruel aunt and uncle’s house. But we soon discover that Harry is not an ordinary soul. He is the son of wizards. However, Harry does not have a clue that he even has these powers until one day a giant appears out of nowhere and delivers to Harry a scholarship to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Once there, Harry discovers friends, foes, his magical powers, and a mission to get rid of the evil that lies hidden in the depths of the school. In the classic sense, friends unite, evil is banished, at least temporarily, and all is well.
There is much more of the same in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, as a more mature Harry and his friends once again battle evil while the young wizard begins to learn more about his adopted land. And what he finds, thanks to Joanne’s vivid imagination, is surprises around every corner. There is the diary that writes back, a dead professor who continues to teach class, and portraits of long-dead ancestors who come alive at night to primp and curl their hair.
By the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Azkaban, the author has seen fit to darken things up. In the Dementors, we see truly disgusting evil. But Harry has by this time grown wise enough and powerful enough to fight the good fight. There is also that priceless moment when Harry discovers Cho Chan on the Quidditch field and thinks to himself that she is kind of pretty.
Joanne has filled the page with enticing images and has us hooked.
“I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to eleven years old,” said Rowling in a Time magazine interview of her ability to tap into her own childhood when writing. “I can remember being a kid and being very powerless and having this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable. I think that I have very vivid memories of how it felt to be Harry’s age.”
On more than one occasion, Joanne has acknowledged her childhood memories as an influence. For her, Hermione is very much herself as a child. And while there was no real-life Harry in her life, she has said that many elements of the character have come from people she knew. And her enemies? They spring to life when Joanne remembers the times when she had to face the school bully and did not know whether she would come out okay.
The author has said that what she likes about writing the adventures of Harry Potter, and what brings her willingly to the task every day, is the notion of opening up a world of dreams and its possibilities.
“When you dream, you can do what you like,” she has told Newsweek.
And there have been dreams aplenty in the first three Harry Potter adventures, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in America), Harry Potter
and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The world Harry Potter inhabits is dotted with strange creatures like Buckbeak, Scabbers, and Crookshanks. There are good people like Professor Dumbledore and Hagrid and bad people like the Dursleys and the evil Lord Voldemort. In the world of Harry Potter, owls run banks, apprentice students chase after balls on flying broomsticks, and apprentice wizards tread lightly as they enter the Forbidden Forest.
But finally it is Harry Potter, a skinny thirteen-year-old with glasses, green eyes, and a head of unruly black hair who is the heart and soul of J. K. Rowling’s adventures. The author feels that Harry is a mirror into her young readers’ souls.
“Harry is smart and good at sports and a lot of things that other children would like to be,” Rowling once told an interviewer. “But children also feel for him because he has lost his parents. If an author makes a character an orphan, few children will want to be an orphan too. But it is a freeing thing because a certain weight of parental expectation is lifted.”
Yet the adventures of Harry Potter are much more than merely escape for the preteen set. Adults have also taken Harry to their hearts and marvel at the simplicity and positive values presented in the tales. Harry often is the center of a family’s time together. Parents read to their children and children often read out loud to their parents. Or parents, after their children have gone to sleep, have been known to sit down with the book and read it themselves.
The author regularly reads her fan mail and so is well aware that the power of Harry Potter to capture readers has spanned the generations. A woman from Glasgow, Scotland, recently wrote to Joanne’s British publisher asking how to go about joining the Harry Potter Fan Club, adding as an aside that she was sixty years old. An Englishman, when inquiring about the possibility of a Harry Potter movie, described himself as “a child at heart, an adult in body.” She has had reports of family squabbles breaking out at bedtime when a parent wanted to finish reading a chapter and ended up taking the book from her children so she could read the book herself.
Joanne has thought long and hard about why people of all ages respond to Harry, and she thinks she knows the reason why.
“I think some of the reason is that Harry has to accept adult burdens in his life, although he is a child,” she said in a recent interview. “There’s something very endearing about that to kids and adults as well. Harry is also an old-fashioned hero. There’s enough human frailty in Harry that people of all ages can identify with.”
The author also points to a sense of morality that runs through each book. Rather than preach, she gets her messages across quite naturally and humanly in the actions and thoughts of her characters. As we have discovered in the first four books, Harry Potter is not the perfect little boy. He bends and breaks the rules when it suits his purpose and has all the insecurities of a normal boy or girl. Children and adults tend to love the fact that they can open a Harry Potter book and see themselves in the characters.
Arthur Levine, the U.S. editor of the Harry Potter books, feels that a big attraction to readers is the idea of growing up underappreciated, feeling like an outcast, and then suddenly bursting forth into the light and being discovered. “That is the fantasy of every person who grows up smart but not very athletic. That’s the emotional connection that drew me to the books,” he told The New York Times.
Whatever the reason, Harry Potter has become a worldwide phenomenon since the publication of the first book in 1997. To date, the first four books have sold more than 10 million copies in over a hundred different languages. The books continue to reside at or near the top of a number of bestseller lists, and a movie studio is in the process of making a big-budget movie of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone that will be in movie theaters all over when this edition of the book is out!
But there is more to the popularity of Harr...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312376979
• ISBN 13: 9780312376970
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 288