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JK Rowling's/Harry Potter's birthday today
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From: Meg Rothstein <811.52>
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:24:38 -0500
How appropriate that Harry Potter's birthday falls on the last day of the month long discussion about popular culture!
It's JK Rowling's birthday, too. (She's only thirty-eight years old.)
Forwarded from The Writers Almanac from Minnesota Public Radio. To subscribe to The Writers Almanac, go to http://mail.publicradio.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reg_welcome
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of J(oanne) K(athleen) Rowling, (books by this author) born in Chipping Sodbury, England (1966). Her readers know today as Harry Potter's birthday. On Harry Potter's eleventh birthday, he learns that he is a wizard, and is officially invited to leave his Muggle aunt and uncle and attend the special Hogwarts school for wizards.
As a child, Rowling was short and stocky and wore very thick glasses, just like Harry Potter. She says she was very bossy, very bookish and terrible at school. When Rowling started writing Harry Potter, she was unemployed and divorced and living on public assistance in a tiny Edinburgh apartment with her infant daughter. She wrote during her daughter's naps, at a table in a caf?. She couldn't afford even a used typewriter. Then the Scottish Arts Council gave her a grant to finish the book. She did, and in the U.S. it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998). It was a dramatic overnight success. She was instantly famous and Harry Potter became a household name. She experienced a level of fame usually reserved for politicians and rock stars. On book tours, she spoke at big sporting venues, with images of her face projected on big screens behind her. At age thirtyfive she was the highest?rning woman in Britain, netting more than thirty million dollars in 2000.
Rowling has had the plots mapped out for a series of seven Harry Potter books since 1995. There's a book for each year that Harry spends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She said, "I want to finish these seven books and look back and think that whatever happened however much this hurricane whirled around me I stayed true to what I wanted to write. This is my Holy Grail: that when I finish writing book seven, I can say hand on heart The Writer's Almanac for Saturd.ems I didn't change a thing. I wrote the story I meant to write."
Rowling released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 21 last year. Within an hour, Barnes and Noble, the largest bookseller in the country, had sold 286,000 copies. That's eighty books per second. By the end of the day the book had sold five million copies total.
Received on Sat 31 Jul 2004 09:24:38 AM CDT
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:24:38 -0500
How appropriate that Harry Potter's birthday falls on the last day of the month long discussion about popular culture!
It's JK Rowling's birthday, too. (She's only thirty-eight years old.)
Forwarded from The Writers Almanac from Minnesota Public Radio. To subscribe to The Writers Almanac, go to http://mail.publicradio.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reg_welcome
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of J(oanne) K(athleen) Rowling, (books by this author) born in Chipping Sodbury, England (1966). Her readers know today as Harry Potter's birthday. On Harry Potter's eleventh birthday, he learns that he is a wizard, and is officially invited to leave his Muggle aunt and uncle and attend the special Hogwarts school for wizards.
As a child, Rowling was short and stocky and wore very thick glasses, just like Harry Potter. She says she was very bossy, very bookish and terrible at school. When Rowling started writing Harry Potter, she was unemployed and divorced and living on public assistance in a tiny Edinburgh apartment with her infant daughter. She wrote during her daughter's naps, at a table in a caf?. She couldn't afford even a used typewriter. Then the Scottish Arts Council gave her a grant to finish the book. She did, and in the U.S. it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998). It was a dramatic overnight success. She was instantly famous and Harry Potter became a household name. She experienced a level of fame usually reserved for politicians and rock stars. On book tours, she spoke at big sporting venues, with images of her face projected on big screens behind her. At age thirtyfive she was the highest?rning woman in Britain, netting more than thirty million dollars in 2000.
Rowling has had the plots mapped out for a series of seven Harry Potter books since 1995. There's a book for each year that Harry spends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She said, "I want to finish these seven books and look back and think that whatever happened however much this hurricane whirled around me I stayed true to what I wanted to write. This is my Holy Grail: that when I finish writing book seven, I can say hand on heart The Writer's Almanac for Saturd.ems I didn't change a thing. I wrote the story I meant to write."
Rowling released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 21 last year. Within an hour, Barnes and Noble, the largest bookseller in the country, had sold 286,000 copies. That's eighty books per second. By the end of the day the book had sold five million copies total.
Received on Sat 31 Jul 2004 09:24:38 AM CDT
