Happy Birthday, Ms. Rowling

[Orrex]

I haven't read even a sentence of any Harry Potter book, but the story of Ms. Rowling's amazing success is a delight.

Best wishes on her 41st birthday!

:hi:

[Reciprocity]

1. Thanks for posting!

I had forgotten that this was Harry's and Jo's birthday.

[Orrex]

2. Well, I guess that makes her 42 today.

Happy Birthday once again, Ms. Rowling!

[CBHagman]

3. Garrison Keillor made note of her birthday.

For those of you who haven't heard The Writer's Almanac on public radio, it's a daily program on events and birthdays in the writing world. Garrison Keillor, the host, always ends the show with a poem and the friendly admonition "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch." I try to listen as often as I can.

Today a profile of Rowling made up almost the entire program.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Rowling got the idea for the Harry Potter books on a four-hour journey by train across England. The train was stopped somewhere between Manchester and London when Rowland looked out at a field of cows and suddenly got the idea for a story about a boy who goes to a school for wizardry. She later said, "Harry Potter just strolled into my head fully formed." By the time the train ride was finished, she had already invented most of the books' major characters and mapped out many of the main plot points.

In the first book about him, Harry Potter is an orphan forced to live with his aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley. The book begins, "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense." Harry's aunt and uncle treat him poorly and force him to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. He has believed for the first 10 years of his life that his parents were killed in a car accident. But on his 11 birthday, he learns that his parents were actually wizards, and that they were murdered by a man named Lord Voldemort, who is trying to take over the world.

The Harry Potter books follow Harry as he attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft, with his new best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, his teachers Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, and his archrival classmate, Draco Malfoy. He hopes to one day avenge the death of his parents.

Rowling only occasionally gives interviews, but she recently admitted that she chose to make Harry an orphan because she began writing the books while her own mother was dying of multiple sclerosis. Her mother died before Rowling had gotten very far in the book, and she never got the chance to tell her mother what she was working on. One of Rowling's biggest regrets is that her mother never knew anything about Harry Potter and never got to see her daughter achieve so much success.