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Entertainment Weekly 9 July 1999
They're Wild About 'Harry' A popular new series aimed at kids works its magic on adults
British author J.K. Rowling spins an enchanting tale of a young wizard who goes from hags to witches
By William Plummer / Joanna Blonska
For author J.K. Rowling, it all started on a train. It was 1990, and she was traveling from Manchester to London. "I was staring out the window," she says, "and the idea for Harry just came. He appeared in my mind's eye, very fully formed. The basic idea was for a boy who didn't know what he was."
Harry may not have known what he was, but readers on six continents now do. A hit in Britain, Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone--about a boy who learns he is a wizard--has also found its way onto the New York Times bestseller list. Rowling's triumph is all the more impressive because she wrote it as a single mother on welfare, scribbling feverishly as her baby daughter slept beside her in the cafes of Edinburgh, Scotland. "My reaction was shock," says Rowling of the day she learned her book had sold in the U.S. for more than $100,000. "This was like being catapulted into fairyland."
Which is precisely what happens to the reader in Sorcerer's Stone. Like Cinderella, Harry lives with nasty relatives who fail to tell him his parents were wizards slain by the evil Voldemort, facts he learns at age 11 when a giant comes to take him to wizard school. That's when the fun begins, as Rowling introduces a mirror world, where banks are run by goblins, owls deliver messages, and schoolboys play Quidditch, a game with broomsticks and balls that go after the players. "We've never had a {children's book} author who has risen as quickly as J.K.," says British reviewer Julia Eccleshare. "I think she might well be regarded as highly as Roald Dahl."
Oddly enough, Rowling's parents--Peter, an aircraft factory manager, and Ann, a lab technician--met on a train in 1963. J.K. and her sister Di grew up in a leafy hamlet in England's Forest of Dean, close to the Welsh border. "The house was full of books," says Rowling, 33. "It's weird, but writing is all I ever wanted to do." Even so, her parents persuaded her to study French at Exeter University, with the hope she would become a bilingual secretary.
Shortly after her locomotivated epiphany in 1990, disasters struck: Her mother, just 45, died of multiple sclerosis. (Her father is now retired in England.) Then Rowling lost her office job in the Manchester chamber of commerce. "It was a nightmarish period," she says, noting that writing about Harry got her through. In September 1990 she traveled to Portugal to teach English and fell for and married a Portuguese journalist she declines to name. Jessica, almost 6, was born in 1993, but the marriage soon collapsed.
It was at this point that Rowling moved to Edinburgh to be near her sister Di. She had three chapters on Harry but no money. "Tiny baby, no job and in a strange place," she says. She found that she qualified for public assistance but not for child care for Jessica. Thus, she was forced to stay unemployed. "I was stuck in an appalling poverty trap," she says.
To get out of her grotty flat, she wrote in cafes. "She was quite an odd sight," says Dougal McBride, co-owner of Nicolson's Cafe. "She would just push the pram with one hand and write away." In April 1995 she started sending her book out and collecting rejections. Finally, literary agent Christopher Little sold it to Bloomsbury Press for about $4,000.
To date, Sorcerer's Stone has sold several million copies. A second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, has just been published. In all, Rowling expects to write seven books about Harry. And then? She isn't sure. "I might just get on another train," she says.
