The last Harry Potter book came out 10 years ago today: Flashback Friday
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the Harry Potter series, was released on this day 10 years ago. While the Potterverse lives on, the final novel’s debut signaled the end of an era.
It’s only fitting that Harry Potter was known as The Boy Who Lived. The bespectacled young wizard has lived far beyond the confines of J.K. Rowling’s pages in movies, theme parks, fan fiction, themed weddings, and about a million other iterations. But today, 10 years to the day after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in Rowling’s seven-volume saga, was published, it seems those pages once again deserve some celebrating. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the books—as recently as May, six of Amazon’s top 20 “most read” books were Harry Potter titles—it’s just that with all the Hollywood adaptations, spin-offs, and the general cloud of hype and floo powder lately, it’s easy to be distracted.
But as wonderful and imaginative as Fantastic Beasts and The Cursed Child (the actual play, not the script-as-novel) and The Wizarding Worlds are, they can never quite compete with the magic (literal and figurative) of the books. Many credit J.K. Rowling’s story of a boy who didn’t know he was the most famous wizard in a parallel world with reinvigorating an entire generation of readers. It was a whole decade ago, but it’s hard to forget the midnight release parties for each story that drew millions to book stores across the country, decked in their witch hats and striped Gryffindor scarves. When Deathly Hallows came out on July 21st, 2007, 11 million copies sold within 24 hours.
Yes, I’m lame and old-fashioned but I miss the days when people read physical books. The release of the Deathly Hallows strikes me as almost a watershed moment for a book-loving kid of my generation. The first several Harry Potter movies were already out at that point (Order of the Phoenix had been released earlier that month) and the Kindle debuted that same year. But in the 10 years between the day a struggling mom in England published her first novel in 1997 and the final book release parties, our culture shifted. Doors were opened for a new wave of storytelling. There’d be no Twilight, no Hunger Games, and no Divergent if not for Harry, Ron, and Hermoine. Kids connected with characters in these stories and were, appropriately, enchanted with a world coming to life not on a screen, but in their minds.
Much has been said about Harry Potter’s cultural impact, but I think perhaps it’s Harry’s creator who said it best, “The stories we love best do live in us forever.”