Entertainment Weekly The Ultimate Guide to Harry Potter

By Meredith Corporation

The world of Harry Potter had grown deeply meaningful for those who came of age using Hogwarts's four houses as shorthand for personality types and seeing the shadow of Voldemort in real-world acts of oppression. For them, Harry Potter is not just a series of books and movies and merchandise but a way of sortingright from wrong that they can remember and draw on for the rest of their lives. For countless readers, Platform 93/4 has served as a gateway into a world in which conflicts between good and evil unfold not in the distant past but the here and now. But it's also doubled as an invitation to explore a long tradition of fantasy literature, fable, folklore and myth, a tradition in which Harry and his friends are now ensconced. Like Oz and Narnia before it, it's a world destined not only to enchant one generation of readers but to be passed down from one to the next. There's magic in that that nothing can undo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781547859702

Book preview

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

HARRY POTTER

Contents

Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Under Harry Potter’s Spell

How author J.K. Rowling’s creation became a worldwide obsession—and why audiences still can’t get enough

The Boy Who Lived

The Sorcerer’s Stone kicked off the series, capturing the hearts and minds of children—and their parents

Picturing Potter

The boy wizard first came to life under the care of book artist Mary GrandPré

The Trials of Youth

The Chamber of Secrets pushed Harry Potter into perilous waters, giving the stars the chance to grow

Objects of Enchantment

The bits and bobs that brought the saga to life

Under a Shifting Moon

Director Alfonso Cuarón took on a refocused story line, key new actors and sky-high stakes in The Prisoner of Azkaban

A Tale of Two Headmasters

Richard Harris’s death left a big hole to fill, but Michael Gambon was game

The Champion & the Spare

In The Goblet of Fire, Harry endures the terror of Voldemort, the tragedy of Cedric’s murder and maybe the biggest challenge of all: puberty

We’re Wild About Hogwarts

Thanks to the immense success of the Harry Potter saga, references in pop culture abound

Double, Double, Toil & Trouble

The Order of the Phoenix landed the bewitching director who’d finish out the saga

Perfect Pairs

These Harry Potter couples didn’t need a draught of Amortentia to fall in love

The Rise of Lord Voldemort

By the time The Half-Blood Prince hit the big screen, it had been two full years since the release of the final book

Visiting the Wizarding World

Universal Orlando opened doors to Hogwarts in 2010

The Hunt for the Horcruxes

The Deathly Hallows gets an explosive two-parter

Growing Up Potter

One of the perks of starring in eight blockbuster movies: You have one heck of a scrapbook to look back on

Life After Hogwarts

What the Harry Potter stars went on to do after the final curtain

A Life Fantastic

It seemed the magic was over until Rowling dreamed up a new (furrier) franchise with Fantastic Beasts

Divining Harry’s Future

From the return of The Cursed Child to a new wizarding experience in New York, there’s still plenty of Potter magic for eager fans to enjoy

IT’S MAGIC!

Under Harry Potter’s Spell

How author J.K. Rowling’s creation became a worldwide obsession—and why audiences still can’t get enough of the boy wizard today. BY KEITH PHIPPS

Author J.K. Rowling autographs books during the European premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2007.

IT TAKES TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS to make the journey from Manchester to London by train, a largely dull trip across stretches of England unlikely to stir the imagination. For the unlucky who fall victim to delays, the voyage can be considerably longer. In 1990 one such prolonged trip stretched past the four-hour mark, inspiring a 25-year-old passenger to start dreaming of a new world. I was staring out the window, J.K. Rowling told People in 1999, 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. Without a pen and too shy to borrow one, Rowling could only imagine what would eventually become one of the most recognizable fictional creations on the planet: a scrawny boy with black hair, glasses and an unmistakable scar destined to become a powerful wizard and, in time, the world’s last hope against the magical forces of darkness. When Rowling reached London, she began writing.

It would take quite a few years for Harry Potter to reach the wider world. During that time, Rowling lost her mother; struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts; moved to Portugal, where she married a journalist; soon left her husband, taking their daughter Jessica with her; moved to Edinburgh to be closer to her sister; then, after qualifying for public assistance but not childcare, writing what would become the first Harry Potter novel in various cafes as Jessica napped.

Rowling finished a draft in 1995. Writing the book was one thing; getting someone to publish it was another. Rowling and agent Christopher Little met with one rejection letter after another until the manuscript reached Bloomsbury, a relatively new publisher that had recently branched out into children’s books. In the hands of Bloomsbury chairman Nigel Newton it found a receptive audience: his 8-year-old daughter Alice. After reading one chapter, she demanded more, needing to know what happened next.

It was a sign of things to come.

Upon publication in the U.K. in June 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone earned positive reviews, though they remained largely confined to blurbs written as part of larger roundups of books for children and young adults. Rowling won headlines, however, when the novel sold for a six-figure sum to the American publisher Scholastic Books (who renamed it Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for North American readers). Talk of sequels—Rowling spoke of Harry Potter as a seven-book series in even her earliest interviews—and a film adaptation soon followed.

More than two decades on, the young wizard’s world is now so fully realized and familiar—through thousands of pages of sequels, epic films, immersive theme parks and Hogwartsian regalia for sale—that it may be hard to remember how that single book first struck such a powerful chord with its earliest readers. In the first half of the 1990s, wizards and magic didn’t take up much real estate in new books for children or in pop culture in general. Harry Potter’s lineage connects more directly to earlier eras than the tastes of the times. Rowling’s acknowledged influences include Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, but it’s hard not to hear other echoes in the series’ pages. The books’ humor, especially scenes involving the cruel Dursley family, recalls Roald Dahl. Harry’s forebears include the boy and girl heroes shouldering the fate of the world found in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series and