Name Date Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture Reading: J.K. Rowling. Please use this reading on author of the Harry Potter novels J.K. Rowling to answer the reading comprehension questions on the worksheet that accompanies it.

No other series of books in publishing history has had the cultural and financial impact of the Harry Potter books by the British Author J.K. Rowling (1965-). With more than 300 million copies in print worldwide, along with a series of highly successful feature films, video games, and even a musical, Rowling has turned her boy-wizard protagonist into a giant industry and made herself a billionaire in the process.

Rowling first conceived of the character (a young boy who is not yet aware that he is a wizard) in 1990, when she was on a train from Manchester to London. The train was delayed for four hours and, during the holdup, she began construction Harry Potter’s world.

Four years later, she was residing in Scotland, a divorced mother of one, living on welfare and in government housing.

She finally completed the book in 1995, but it would be another two years before its publication in Britain. In 1997, Bloomsbury published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with an initial run of 1,000 copies. And so began Rowling’s unlikely rise to literary and cultural stardom.

Scholastic payed $105,000 (a hefty sum for a work by an unknown author) for the US rights, then published the first book as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

As Rowling released subsequent books, each broke the records of the previous ones. The seventh and final novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had a record-setting print run of 12 million copies in the United States alone and sold 8.3 million copies in the first twenty-four hours of its American release in 2007,

Beyond the incredible sales records and the film’s enormous receipts (the first five films grossed $4.4 billion worldwide), some studies have shown that the Harry Potter books have also had a significant impact on children’s reading habits. In 2005, Gordon Brown (1951-), then British chancellor of the exchequer (who became prime minister in 2007), said, “I think J.K. Rowling has done more for literacy around the world than any single human being.”

Additional Facts

1. Rowling used her first initial (J, for Joanne) and the first initial of one of her grandmothers (K, for Kathleen) as her pseudonym rather than her first name, Joanne, to attract more young male readers.

2. Rowling says she has been writing continuously since age six. She developed her storytelling skills to entertain her younger sister, Di.

3. On the train ride during which she conceived of Harry Potter and his world, she did not have a pen and was too shy to ask a stranger for one. So once she got home she wrote furiously to document all her ideas.

Adapted from: Kidder, David S, and Noah Oppenheim. The Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture: Converse Confidently about Society and the Arts. Emmaus PA: Modern Times, 2008.