The Magic Of Potter

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No one can explain the literally unprecedented Harry Potter phenomenon, starting with Rowling, now 35, whose life has been changed utterly by the product of her imagination. Seven years ago, she was the single mother of a small daughter, living in a two-room flat in Edinburgh, listening to mice skittering behind the walls. Now she is internationally famous and earning, according to various estimates, somewhere in the range of $30 million to $40 million a year. Once, during a bad patch, she dreaded the hostile looks she would attract while lining up at the local post office to claim her weekly income-support check. When she visited the U.S. and Canada in October, she stood, with 10,000 pairs of eyes on her, and gave a reading in the Toronto SkyDome. Nothing in the wonder-filled saga of Harry Potter seems remotely as implausible as the triumph of his author.

Rowling has managed to maintain a private life despite the maelstrom of attention and adulation roaring about her. She now has a comfortable house in Edinburgh that she keeps off limits to outsiders. When not traveling, she takes daughter Jessica, 7, to school each morning and is able to stroll and window-shop on Edinburgh's Princes Street almost always unrecognized by fans.

She did extensive publicity during the summer and fall for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, not to increase sales--a laughable notion given the enormous, pent-up demand--but to make herself available to some of her young readers. In October she went public for a project unrelated to Harry Potter but of personal concern to her. She agreed to become the first ambassador, i.e., spokeswoman, for the National Council for One Parent Families, a British charity, and donated $725,000 to the cause.

Rowling has a very good reason for trying to keep the world at bay. She is after all a working writer, committed to producing three more novels that will bring to an end the seven years Harry and his classmates spend at Hogwarts. And ominous news on this front emerged late in the year: Rowling's agent, Christopher Little, announced that there would be no new Harry Potter novel before 2002. (Imagine here a worldwide gnashing of teeth--baby, permanent and false.) But there will be two brief new, pseudonymous Rowling books coming this winter, based on titles in the Hogwarts library: Quidditch Through the Ages, by Kennilworthy Whisp, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, by Newt Scamander. Rowling will give the net proceeds to the Harry Potter Fund at Comic Relief U.K., a charity helping children in the developing world.

With no new novel in the offing, Harry addicts will perforce focus their anticipation during the coming year on the film version of the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, directed by Chris Columbus and scheduled for release in November by Warner Bros. The studio, which shares a parent company with Time, has already begun stocking its franchise stores with Harry Potter merchandise. This is a sensitive matter, and all involved are hoping it proceeds serenely. Rowling knows product spin-offs have become essential to the marketing of blockbuster films for children, but she has expressed reservations about the commercialization of Harry Potter.