The Harry Potter universe at 26: How one woman spawned an unlikely empire

People lined up for hours outside bookstores ahead of the worldwide release of part 1 of the seventh book - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - on July 21, 2007. (Photo by Sergey Pyatakov / RIA Novosti via Wikimedia Commons)

Every summer in the late 1990s, millions of kids around the English-speaking world would dream of being summoned to the 9 and 3/4th platform at London’s King Cross station. Never mind that it didn’t actually exist, except for in the mega-hit books of a British author called J.K. Rowling, which followed one orphan wizard boy as he came of age and into his own in a world of awful secrets and terrible demons.

Harry Potter’s origin story is 21st century urban legend unto itself. Joanne Rowling had been passionate about storytelling since she was a kid growing up in 1960s Gloucestershire. She majored in classical literature from the University of Exeter, and proceeded to work at Amnesty International, among other places, to pay the bills while she wrote stories on her lunch hour. It was on a train journey—while the train was stalled in the middle of the English countryside—that Rowling’s imagination conceived of a boy wizard who doesn’t know he’s a wizard, going to wizard school.

Six months after Rowling began to flesh the idea out, her mother, suffering from multiple sclerosis, passed away. This tragic event affected Rowling deeply—perhaps it was the grief that pushed her deeper into the wizarding world she was building. So much, in fact, that she reached a point where no one would hire her since she would be writing instead of working. “I was jobless,” she said of that time years later. “I was a lone parent. I was the biggest loser I knew.”

That trauma also informed the Harry Potter story at an elemental level. The universe—the demons and dragons, the eerie castles and moorish landscapes—was inspired by the Arthurian mythological literature she studied at university. But the characters and their narrative arcs, the eventual foregrounding of Harry, an orphan wizard, that adolescent’s worldview of love and loss, right and wrong, good and evil came from her own reckoning with life, death and immortality.

All of this becomes clear in retrospect as there was a chance that Harry Potter would never have emerged from his cupboard under the stairs. The first manuscript sat in literary agents’ slush piles and had 12 publishers reject it, because, as academics have noted: “It was very non-politically correct to have boarding schools. It was two times as long as any children’s book had any right to be. Its title was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It was all the things that publishers said a book shouldn’t be.”

Bloomsbury, then a new children’s books imprint, took it up. Harry Potter arrived in the summer of 1997, a time when fantasy fiction didn’t hold the kind of sway it did during the 1950s, when Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings were both released. That year, Arundhati Roy’s A God of Small Things was impressing the high literary circles. Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie was hitting best seller lists. Arthur Golden gave the world Memoirs of a Geisha, which would quickly become a movie.

On the other hand, comic books were transforming into the behemoth that presaged the 21st century tradition to screen—volatile and vivacious with storylines like the Death of Superman and the replacement of Spider-Man with a clone. Elsewhere, George RR Martin’s first book in A Song of Fire and Ice series, released in 1996, was winning awards. And yet, Martin, along with other beloved authors such as Terry Pritchett and Neil Gaiman, were still niche.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone flew higher than the rest, selling 800,000 copies in 10 months. Odd enough for a book about a wizard and magic but it did because it melded the fantastical and the familiar to brilliant effect. In Harry’s time with the Dursleys, there’s something of the Cinderella story; in Hogwarts (and the way the series is laid out across seven school years), something of the British boarding school genre, such as Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers and St Clare’s.

In Hogwarts, Rowling built a world that was a slightly enhanced version of the one we know, not removed from it. Newspapers came with moving images, portraits on the wall could talk to you, butterbeer sounded delicious, Quidditch was cricket in the sky on flying broomsticks. And we all knew a professor like McGonagall and a father figure like Dumbledore.

No doubt helped by the timing of publication—as schools let out for the summer—each successive Harry Potter book became an instant blockbuster, selling millions of copies. Before the third book was out in 1999, Rowling had sold the movie rights to books 1-4 to Warner Bros and became a billionaire in the process.

At last count, the seven books in the Harry Potter series, available in 85 languages, have sold more than 600 million copies worldwide, making them the best-selling book series in history. The last four books consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history, with the final instalment selling roughly 2.7 million copies in the United Kingdom and 8.3 million copies in the United States within twenty-four hours of its release.

Then there’s the movie business, which amplified Harry Potter’s influence—despite some very questionable initial CGI and casting, if you ask Potterheads. In 2016, the total value of the Harry Potter franchise was estimated at $25 billion, making Harry Potter one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

That’s not all. Toys and merch, stores, experiences at amusement parks, video games, along with a theatre production and spinoff titles—the Harry Potter universe has expanded to unimaginable proportions in the last three decades. The Harry Potter experiences reportedly saved Universal’s theme park business. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them had surprisingly good luck at the box office. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a must-see on the lists of many travellers visiting London.

Meanwhile, Hogwarts Legacy, the latest, critically-acclaimed video game released by Warner Bros Games under its imprint Portkey Games, sold more than 12 million copies within two weeks of launch in February 2023, generating $850 million in global sales revenue. This is massive, considering it’s a title based on a book that really struck a chord with the millennial generation. Gen Z’s affiliation with Harry Potter seems to have stretched far enough only to produce satirical takes on the “boy who was unalived”.

In fact, JK Rowling isn’t the unanimously adored author and celebrity she once was, thanks in no small part to her outspokenness on gender and sexuality issues. Twitter is usually up in arms against what is perceived to be transphobia on her behalf. Her books have retroactively been read with this lens—people have wondered, horrified, who the dementors of Azkaban, the wizarding world’s prison, were metaphors for in real life.

But book sales continue to climb, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter stores in New York, Tokyo, London are always full, the video games have proved to be a hit. There’s even talk of a reboot for the films—if there can be a new Batman for every generation, why not Potter, Granger and Weasley? For at its core, Harry Potter is a tale of self-determination, an internal battle for the triumph of good over evil. Christian allegory or not, that’s the stuff that makes heroes—made further irresistible if they have an invisibility cloak, a marauder’s map and an Elder wand in their arsenal.