When he was one year old, the most evil wizard for hundreds and hundreds of years attempted to kill him. and so then I kind of worked backwards from that position to find out how that could be, that he wouldn't know what he was. Harry later learns that the reason why he survived was that his mother sacrificed herself for him, and her love was something that Voldemort could not destroy.Īccording to Rowling, fleshing out this back story was a matter of reverse planning: "The basic idea Harry. Voldemort's body was destroyed, but his soul was not. He attempted to kill Harry too, but was unsuccessful and only left a lightning bolt shaped scar on Harry's forehead. Starting in 1981, when Harry was just one year old, his parents, James and Lily, were murdered by the most powerful Dark Wizard, Lord Voldemort (subsequently called "You-Know-Who" and "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" by those too superstitious to use his actual name). Harry first appears in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. "The advantage of a fictional hero or heroine is that you can know them better than you can know a living hero, many of whom you would never meet if people like Harry and identify with him, I am pleased, because I think he is very likeable." Harry Potter books Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Rowling has also maintained that Harry is a suitable real-life role model for children. However, she maintained that Harry was not directly based on any real-life person: "he came just out of a part of me". White's novel The Once and Future King is "Harry's spiritual ancestor." Finally, she established Harry's birth date as 31 July, the same as her own. In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, Rowling also established that the character of Wart in T. Her own mother's death on 30 December 1990 inspired Rowling to write Harry as a boy longing for his dead parents, his anguish becoming "much deeper, much more real" than in earlier drafts because she related to it herself. Having a child of my own reinforces my belief that children above all want security, and that's what Hogwarts offers Harry." Hogwarts has to be a boarding school-half the important stuff happens at night! Then there's the security.
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She explained in a 1999 interview with The Guardian: "Harry had to be an orphan-so that he's a free agent, with no fear of letting down his parents, disappointing them . While developing the ideas for her book, she also decided to make Harry an orphan who attended a boarding school called Hogwarts. She stated that the idea of "this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me".
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The book and film series revolve around Harry's struggle to adapt to the wizarding world and defeat Voldemort. Harry also discovers that he is already famous throughout the novel's magical community, and that his fate is tied with that of Lord Voldemort – the internationally feared Dark Wizard and murderer of his parents, Lily and James. Thus, he attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to practise magic under the guidance of the kindly headmaster Albus Dumbledore and other school professors along with his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. The majority of the books' plot covers seven years in the life of the orphan Harry, who, on his eleventh birthday, learns he is a wizard. Harry James Potter is a fictional character and the titular protagonist in J.