In addition, the books are full of foreshadowings. Such detail lends both reality and interest to the plot. The stories are also highly detailed: we know what the characters look like and what they wear when the students at Hogwarts School settle into a banquet in the Great Hall, we get a menu of what they eat. Readers find it hard to put down a Harry Potter book until they have reached its end. Her plots are suspenseful and surprising, as full of twists and puzzles as the hedge maze in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rowling is an excellent spinner of tales, who weaves an engrossing story. Plot is one cause of the books' popularity. Harry Potter's success has many causes: plot, characters, setting, and theme among them. There has been merchandising aplenty, but it has followed the success of the books, not caused that success. The remarkable popularity of the Harry Potter stories cannot be explained as the result of merchandising. In one month in 2007, all seven Harry Potter books were on the list of ten best-sellers.

The books have been translated into sixty-five languages, including Hindi, Icelandic, Latin, Vietnamese, and Welsh. Of the first six books, 325 million copies have been sold around the globe. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 8.3 million copies in the United States during the first twenty-four hours after its publication. This cycle of seven stories is undoubtedly the major fantasy work of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

With the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, the Harry Potter cycle is now complete, so we can look at the whole story of the Boy-Who-Lived. 'Harry Potter and the Hero With a Thousand Faces.' Quest 97. 1 (Fall 2009): 25-29.

Originally printed in the Winter 2009 issue of Quest magazine.Ĭitation: Algeo, John.

Hero of the thousand faces