David McCullough has written critically praised best-selling biographies of Presidents Harry S Truman and John Adams. He has chronicled the digging of the Panama Canal and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He has told the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s adolescence and young adulthood and has detailed the destruction wrought by the Johnstown Flood in 1889.
And he’s eagerly awaiting the publication next week of the new Harry Potter book.
“I’m a Harry Potter fan,” he says. “The Harry Potter books are very well-written, and they are not written down to children.”
Or, apparently, to world-famous scholars.
McCullough, who turns 70 on July 7, says he still reads children’s books for pleasure. “I think children’s literature is a serious art form,” he says. “Some of the best writing by some of our best writers has been in the children’s literature field — Robert Louis Stevenson, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, E.B. White. [The success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books] shows that, in the final analysis, what matters is talent. This woman is extremely talented. More power to her!”
Across the U.S. and around the globe, millions of children, teenagers and, yes, adults are counting the days until June 21 when the 896-page “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (Scholastic, $29.99) will finally become available after a seemingly interminable three-year wait.
For the vast majority of these readers, the new Harry Potter will be the publishing event of the year. To them, nothing’s as good as another Hogwarts adventure; nothing comes close.
But what about the nation’s literary all-stars? Are major poets looking forward to Harry V? Best-selling novelists? Historians? Mystery writers, science fiction writers? Other children’s book writers?
Well, the answer is no and yes, and yes and no. A dozen major U.S. authors, asked recently about their interest in “Order of the Phoenix,” were split down the middle, with half saying they are likely to read the book now or later, and half saying it’s not going to make their reading list.
Samuel R. Delany, one of the giants of science fiction and author of the new short story collection “Aye, and Gomorrah” (Vintage, $14), says the new Harry Potter “is not a big object on my event horizon.”
By contrast, Mary Higgins Clark, the queen of romantic suspense, is looking forward this summer to finally being able to dig into Rowling’s books about the boy wizard.
She adds, “I certainly wish I had written them.”
That’s saying a lot when you consider Clark has more than 70 million books in print. Of course, even that huge number pales in comparison to the 200 million copies of Harry Potter books printed in 55 languages in more than 200 countries since mid-1997.
That publishing record doesn’t include the new book, for which 8.5 million copies are being produced for the U.S. market alone, believed to be the largest print run in history.
Clark says she bought copies of the books for her grandchildren and a set for herself “to see what they were all about.” With a break in her writing schedule over the next few months, Clark plans “to sit on the front porch and read and read” at her vacation homes in Spring Lake, N.J., and on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
“I’m curious,” she says. “I always like a good story. I always preach that being a storyteller is what being a writer is all about. [Rowling] has done a fantastic job. I love the fact that she was a single mother writing in a cafeteria. Her ex must be banging his head against the wall.”
`A bit of verve’
Delany says he read about 50 pages of the first Harry Potter, probably while standing in the aisle of a bookstore, and found it written “with a bit of verve. It reminded me of `The Magic Shop’ from the ’40s. It seemed like a very nice retread of that book, which was a book I was very fond of when I was a kid.” (In “The Magic Shop” by Maurice Dolbier, now out of print, Denise and her brother Dick have close encounters with magic wands, dark forces and some characters out of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”)
The immense popularity of Rowling’s books, Delany says, can be good and bad: “If it makes people read, fine. If it keeps them from reading anything else — that’s the downside.”
Others who will be taking a pass on the new Harry Potter include:
– James Lee Burke, known for his lyrical but violent Dave Robicheaux crime novels: “My reading interest is of a different kind, no reflection on [Rowling]. They’re children’s books. Normally children read children’s books. I never enjoyed fantasy. I never liked that kind of book when I was a child.”
– U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins: “I’ve never read a Potter book and have no plans to read one — for no good reason except that literary fantasy long ago ceased to hold my interest. If I had children, I would certainly read the Potter books just to see what they were up to. As it is, I am content to reminisce on my own childhood favorites like `Black Beauty’ and `The Yearling.’ No flying around or wands, but very good for the development of sympathy.”
– Maxine Kumin, the 1981-82 consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, forerunner to the poet laureate post: “I’m delighted for the author, but I have so many books on my desk. I can’t do everything, and this is one of the omitted. I think every first book of poetry in this country comes to my desk.”
In an e-mail message, novelist John Barth, highly praised as “a writer’s writer” for his experimental Postmodern fiction, makes a similar point: “I’m pleasantly impressed by the success of the Harry Potter series: It’s reassuring to know that there are still so many readers out there, whether or not it’s one’s own books that they happen to be reading. But I haven’t looked into any of them myself: One’s reading time is not infinite.”
On his present reading list, he says, are such works as “The Adventures of Lucky Pierre” by Robert Coover (Grove/Atlantic, $24), “The Singular Pilgrim” by Rosemary Mahoney (Houghton Mifflin, $25) and “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith (Knopf, $14) as well as classics such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron.”
But — Barth is asked via return e-mail — with all the Harry Potter hype, with all the millions of sales, hasn’t he found himself curious to see what’s in the books, maybe glancing through a copy in a bookstore or at a friend’s home?
“Nope,” he replies.
Yet, for every John Barth, it seems, there’s a Rita Dove who can’t get enough of Harry.
Dove, the U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995, has read the first four Rowling books and says she’ll definitely read the new one.
“I don’t believe that they’re great literature,” she says. “I read them for enjoyment. They’re better than crossword puzzles — and I love crossword puzzles. They have all the icons that push your buttons, and they’re done with a lot of humor. And the inventiveness of the names of, like, the candy [e.g., Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, Fizzing Whizbees, Pepper Imps] — the names delight me.”
Another fan is Nathaniel Philbrick, who put up with the irritations of the red tide off the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year rather than interrupt his reading of a Potter book.
Philbrick, the author of “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” (Penguin, $14), the 2000 National Book Award winner for non-fiction, was in Florida with his family last March for a vacation. On the plane trip from his home in Massachusetts, Philbrick had read Book III. And he couldn’t wait to set himself at the water’s edge to tackle Book IV.
“We were at this beachside cottage, and the red tide hit,” Philbrick recalls. “It’s this marine organism that creates a toxic tide. The water reddens, fish die. You can feel it in your respiratory system. It was one of those things that was building during the day. One by one, the rest of my family went inside. I just didn’t want to get up. I spent the entire day out there with my nose running and my eyes itching. I was out there till the sun went down.”
British historian Antonia Fraser, known for her highly popular, well-researched biographies on such figures as Oliver Cromwell, Marie Antoinette and Mary, Queen of Scots, also has a vacation story involving Harry Potter.
“We rented this farmhouse for a family holiday, and three of my granddaughters were all reading the same book [Harry IV]. They each had to have their own copy,” Fraser says. “And I remember one of them was trying to spread marmalade on toast without taking her eyes off the book, which was a pretty doomed project.”
Such intense interest, though, was enough to convince Fraser that it would be worth her while to investigate the books herself. “I read the first one and thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Harold Pinter is no fan
What about her husband, playwright Harold Pinter? Is he a Potter fan? “No,” Fraser says. “It’s not his bag.”
Sequels aren’t Julia Alvarez’s bag.
Alvarez, the author of the 1991 best seller, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” (Plume, $14), and of several works for children and young adults, found the first Harry Potter book “charming,” but not those that followed. “One of the things I learned from [Rowling’s] book is you can write smart books for kids,” Alvarez says. “You can put in words they might not know, and they’ll stay with you.”
But, after reading the second installment in the series, Alvarez says, “I felt a letdown. Part of the way a book works — good books — it’s the mortality. The fact that it’s going to be over gives it an extra charge. It’s part of the thing that makes you wistful as you get toward the end. It makes it live inside you.”
Louis Sachar, the author of such widely popular young adult books as “There’s a Boy in the Girls Bathroom” (Random House, $4.99) and “Holes” (Yearling, $6.50), the basis of the popular movie now in theaters, has read all four of the Potter books and is curious to see how the fifth one turns out.
Still, he’s not exactly a fan.
“I like the world she creates, and the characters are interesting. But I don’t find the stories themselves so compelling,” Sacher says. “I was a little bothered that each story ends with a big battle with — What’s his name?”
Sacher says that, as a storyteller, he has learned from such writers as J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. “Any book that moves me, I feel I learn something from. The Harry Potter books don’t move me.” Yet, he also recognizes, “There’s a certain degree of integrity to them. It’s not just hype. [Rowling] is serious about her writing. I’ve never gotten the feeling she’s just trying to cash in.”
Even so, Harry Potter has made Rowling a millionaire many times over, and the cash registers will be ringing up even more profits for her when “The Order of the Phoenix” hits the bookstores.
One of those who will be plunking down his credit card will be David McCullough. “I have 16 grandchildren. I may be a major buyer,” he says.
Precious memories
Indeed, McCullough, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Adams and Truman and has narrated numerous television documentaries, says Rowling and Harry Potter provided him with a particularly precious memory.
“To see my 8-year-old granddaughter reading a 700-page Harry Potter book was one of the thrills of my life,” he says. “I saw her go out with the book on a summer morning and sit in the car because that was the only quiet place.”
Books that can elicit such devotion from millions of children, he says, are a blessing — and a rosy portent for the future.
“You can be sure,” McCullough says, “Harry Potter is not going to be the last thing they read.”
