Word: books
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whipping through Ian Fleming at age nine. Sometime later she discovered Jane Austen, whom Rowling calls "my favorite author ever." She was writing a novel for adults when, during a 1990 train ride, "Harry Potter strolled into my head fully formed." For the next five years Rowling worked on Book One and plotted out the whole series, which will consist of seven novels, one for each year Harry spends at Hogwarts. "Those five years really went into creating a whole world. I know far more than the reader will ever need to know about ridiculous details...
Since her characters grow a year older in each book, Rowling says that certain unavoidable changes are in store for them and the readers. A hint of what's ahead appears in The Prisoner of Azkaban, when Harry notices Cho Chang, the only girl on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. "She was shorter than Harry by about a head, and Harry couldn't help noticing, nervous as he was, that she was extremely pretty. She smiled at Harry as the teams faced each other behind their captains, and he felt a slight lurch in the region of his stomach that...
...Rowling acknowledges, Harry is on the brink of adolescence and will fall into that hormonal morass any day now. Harry and friends will notice, and do more than notice, members of the opposite sex, and the action starts in Book Four where they all fall in love with the wrong people. A foolishly smitten or moony Harry may challenge the devotion of the readers who admire his innocent, boyish virtues and unflappable dignity, except, perhaps, those readers who have grown into adolescents themselves...
...certain Potter purists are concerned about Harry's upcoming first appearance on the silver screen. British producer David Heyman saw a blurb on The Sorcerer's Stone shortly after its British publication but before the book became a smash. He brought the project to Warner Bros. (like TIME, owned by Time Warner), which optioned the book. The plan is for a live-action film, with Harry played as a British schoolboy. A first script, by Steven Kloves, who wrote and directed The Fabulous Baker Boys, is due by the end of the year...
...have been born in the 1970s, but he grew up in the 1870s. Home was a hillside West Virginia farm plowed by a team of Percheron draft horses. School was his parents' kitchen, his neighbors' fields. Town was a country crossroads with two stores, and entertainment a new book from the library. And though the young man with the Old Testament name and the Mark Twain upbringing later went on to study at Harvard and Yale, mixing with the privileged and the trend-conscious, his heart remained in the hills, beneath the oaks...