Word: potter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This speech is one of the darkest and most unsettling in the Potter books to date. It creates a vivid physical embodiment of a painful mental state, which Muggles call depression, and it demonstrates Rowling's considerable emotional range. She can be both genuinely scary and consistently funny, adept at both broad slapstick and allusive puns and wordplay. She appeals to the peanut gallery with such items as Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, a wizard candy that means what it says on its package; it offers every flavor, ranging from chocolate and peppermint to liver and tripe and earwax...
...such fun to write," Rowling says of the first Harry Potter book. "They still are incredibly fun to write." She lives comfortably but not lavishly in Edinburgh with her daughter Jessie, 6, fending off as many outside demands on her time as she can in order to keep writing. She was completely unprepared for, and doesn't much like, all the press attention that has been mounting since she became a best-selling first novelist. During some early interviews, she mentioned that her beginning work on the Harry Potter books corresponded briefly with a bad patch in her personal life...
...dreamy" internal childhood. She began writing stories when she was six. She also read widely, 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...
Rowling insists that she never consciously set out to write for children, but that working on Harry Potter taught her how easily she could tap into her childhood memories. "I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old [Harry's age when the series opens]. You're very powerless, and kids have this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable." That's a good description of the social setup she portrays at Hogwarts, where the students have stretches of time with little or no adult supervision. Rowling believes young people...
...Harry Potter fans have something a good deal more worrisome to fret about than potential smooching and hand holding. Rowling has been dropping increasingly pointed promises that the four remaining Harry Potter books will turn darker than the first three. "There will be deaths," she says. "I am writing about someone, Voldemort, who is evil. And rather than make him a pantomime villain, the only way to show how evil it is to take a life is to kill someone the reader cares about." Can she possibly mean (oh!) Hermione, (no!) Ron or (gasp!) Harry himself? Rowling discloses nothing...