Not only have her books sold all around the world, including the U.K., Australia, China, and the United States, but she has sold over a million books in her seven-book series. So I pose the question: Why is Harry Potter so famous?
I'm sure everyone has heard the story, how Ms. Rowling was a poor mom with nothing going for her except a scrap of napkins at a coffee shop, napkins that held the beginning of an epic tale written after a boy named Harry Potter. How she sent in the first manuscript to a handful of different publishers, all of whom rejected her novel until Bloomsbury finally decided to pursue it. How the first book grew to staggering heights in as little as a year.
It seemed as though each new book she produced gathered more and more avid readers, growing until there were midnight parties with people dressed as wizards lining every bookseller's street corner the night they came out. Seven times the media went crazy about Harry Potter, seven times people waited in line to hold the new book in their hands. And then they stepped it up to a whole new level: the movies.
So now Harry Potter claimed all those that like reading and then those that preferred not to. Harry Potter came to life on a television screen and the lines started over, those that had waited for the books now claimed a seat at midnight premieres. Once more us mere Muggles were allowed to gape at exquisitely dressed wizards and witches as they poured out of the movie theatres.
I know that some people are probably rolling their eyes, and in a way they have every right to. Harry Potter has become an era of its own. I claim that Harry Potter was my childhood. From the time I was seven to this coming September, Harry Potter has been riding beside me in both book and movie form. Come this seventh movie, Harry Potter will have finally finished its exhausting 13-year run.
But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Aside from widely circulating, there are some more concrete reasons as to why Harry Potter is famous.
Ms. Rowling took every tale of witches, wizards, and evil and transformed it into one complete tale. She made up different kinds of creatures, roping in those already associated with fantasy, and then went as far as to create the epic kind of evil: Lord Voldemort. In some way, Ms. Rowling created the world that now houses the ideal witch and wizard.
We meet Harry at the age of ten, living in a horrible house with a bully for a brother, a thunderous boneless monster of an uncle, and a nose-in-the-air aunt who resembles a vulture more than a human being. Not only is that image a vulnerable one, it's also probably one that more people can relate to then not. Who doesn't claim to have a crazy family or that handful of bones in the closet? We then have the epic escape that everyone wishes for: Hogwarts. From age six to sixty people can understand the draw of a magical world where anything is possible, and of course, with this magical world comes wealth and fame. Harry goes from being a normal scrawny boy to being a hero in the space of a book. What little boy doesn't wish for that kind of standing?
So we have publicity, an epic series, and the ability to relate to the characters in the book. What's missing? Oh, yes. A hot cast, complete with British accents, to put a face against the written characters, enter Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint. Now not only can you have your bookshelf lined with the seven novels, but your walls can have attractive faces on them, too. In short, Harry Potter did everything that few other books can do. They took the W out of wizard and put it in a magical world that could, hypothetically, exist inside our own; all you have to do to get there is walk through a brick wall at a train station.
Or you could just book a flight to Florida.
Orlando decided to one-up everything that had already come into existence. Hello, "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" theme park. I haven't been there myself, but I hear it looks scary-like the movies. I also hear that The Three Broomsticks really exists and that you can stop there to enjoy some Butterbeer. The fact that The World of Harry Potter exists is a little bit of a miracle in itself.
The best thing about Harry Potter: it doesn't matter if you love it or not because Harry Potter is going to go down in history as a story that launched a multi-million dollar world and gave life to dreams.
