by Bruno Somerset

Created on: July 28, 2009   Last Updated: July 31, 2009

Perhaps the sheer enormity of the Harry Potter book sales, film profits, and ancillary merchandise produced have overshadowed the fact that J.K Rowling is one of the more accomplished writers of our time. It may also be due to the fact that the Harry Potter books are thought of as only "children's books" that she isn't counted among the literary greats of the 20th century. Either possibility severely shortchanges Rowling's ability.

The idea that the Harry Potter series is simply "kid books" is held only by those who have never read them to begin with. Rowling has done things in the Potter books that we have frankly never seen before. First, she allowed her characters to grow up. Most children's literature features characters who are frozen in time; the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew remained the same age through decades of new adventures. She also presented the adults in the stories as something other that buffoons for the kids to outwit. Furthermore, she dealt with important issues like tolerance, trust, love, and death in such a subtle way that we often didn't even notice that we were learning a lesson. Ultimately, she created a fantasy world that mirrored the real one. And she made it so exciting that kids would choose reading about Harry over playing the latest video game.

The result of all of these various factors is something few would have thought possible when Harry Potter debuted in 1997: for more than ten years now, J.K. Rowling and her boy wizard have made reading cool again, for adults as well as children. Before Harry, educators and pundits all lamented that reading was dead. Who would have imagined that millions of children would attempt to read an 800-page book in one sitting, or that their parents would be anxiously waiting for them to finish reading so they could start?

With the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling opened up a world of imagination to a generation of kids who thought for anything to be entertaining it had to have a plug, a screen, or an Internet connection. And these kids (and hopefully their parents as well) will keep reading, if only in the hope of finding another book or series that grabs them the way Harry Potter did. Even if Rowling never writes another word, people everywhere who love books owe her a debt of gratitude for making reading a novel something we, and more importantly our children, look forward to again.

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