In England, where it was published last year, ““Harry’’ has been a hit, selling a whopping 150,000 copies and winning a British Book Award and a Smarties Prize, sort of a Booker Prize for children’s literature. (Adults as well as kids have taken to the book. Rowling’s British publisher recently issued a second edition with a more grown-up cover, so older readers wouldn’t be embarrassed to carry ““Harry.’’) The American rights to the book were purchased by Scholastic Books for more than $100,000, the most ever paid for a first-time author’s children’s book. The U.S. edition arrived in stores in late August and is currently No. 2 on the Publishers Weekly children’s best-seller list, and author Joanne Rowling, 33, has just signed a seven-book contract and a seven-figure deal for movie rights with Warner Brothers.
Rowling’s Cinderella-like story began eight years ago in Edinburgh. An unemployed schoolteacher and the divorced mother of a 3-month-old daughter, she began to write out of desperation, convinced that she had nothing left to lose. To escape her chilly flat, she wheeled her daughter’s stroller through the streets until the baby fell asleep. Then she would dash into a coffee shop and write. Unable to afford either a word processor or the cost of copying her manuscript, she typed it out twice and sent it off to publishers. The day her English publisher bought the story, she says, was ““comparable only to having my daughter.''
As melancholy as it is fantastic, ““Harry Potter’’ has been likened to the dark juvenile novels of Roald Dahl and C. S. Lewis. ““I don’t dumb my books down for kids,’’ Rowling says. And it’s clear that the author is no one-shot wonder: when the sequel to ““Harry Potter,’’ ““Chamber of Secrets,’’ debuted in England this summer, it climbed both the children’s and adult best-seller lists, outselling John Grisham and Tom Clancy. ““Happily ever after’’ never looked so smart.
