Harry Potter?

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In 1990, Rowling was on a crowded train from Manchester to London when the idea for Harry simply “fell” into her head. Rowling gives an account of the experience on her website:

I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one. I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). [1]
That evening J.K. Rowling began the pre-writing for her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S.), pre-writing that would include the plot to each of her seven planned books, in addition to an enormous amount of historical and biographical information on her characters and universe. [2] Eventually Rowling relocated to Portugal, where she in 1992 married her first husband, and in 1993 had her first child, Jessica, all the while continuing her writing of Stone. When the marriage dissolved, Rowling returned to Britain with her daughter and settled in Edinburgh to be near her sister, famously continuing her writing of Philosopher's Stone in local coffee shops. Bringing in only £90 a week (£70 of which were from income support) and unable to secure a place for her daughter in a nursery, the sleeping infant Jessica would be a constant companion to her mother as Rowling labored to finish the book that she had at this point begun to fear would never be completed.

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In 1999 Nancy Kathleen Stouffer, who is sometimes known by her penname of N.K. Stouffer, quietly began to allege copyright and trademark infringement of her 1984 work The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly by J.K. Rowling.[14]

The primary basis for Stouffer's claims lie in her own invention of Muggles, non-magical elongated humanoids of sorts and the title character of the second work, Larry Potter, a bespectacled boy with dark, albeit wavy hair (Rowling's Potter is characterized as having all of those though with unruly instead of wavy hair.) Stouffer contended (and still does to this day) that it is not just these examples and similar names but that it is "the cumulative effect of all of it combined" with the other comparisons she lists on her real muggles website.[15]

J.K. Rowling, along with Scholastic Press (Rowling's american publisher) and Warner Brothers (holders of the series' film rights), preempted Stouffer with a suit of their own seeking a declaratory judgment that they had not infringed on any of Stouffer's works. Rowling, through the use of expert witnesses who brought into question the authenticity of Stouffer's evidence, won the case with Stouffer's claims being dismissed with prejudice and Stouffer herself being fined $50,000 for her "pattern of intentional bad faith conduct" in relation to her employment of fraudulent evidentiary submissions, along with being ordered to pay a portion of the plaintiffs' legal fees.[16]

Added controversy stems from some Christian groups in the United States who have denounced the series for promoting witchcraft and Satanism. "It contains some powerful and valuable lessons about love and courage and the ultimate victory of good over evil," said Paul Hetrick, spokesman for Focus on the Family, a national Christian group based in Colorado Springs. "However, the positive messages are packaged in a medium — witchcraft — that is directly denounced in Scripture." [17] Accordingly, Harry Potter has been the subject of various book burnings.[18] Continuing with the same line of reasoning, in 2002, Chick Publications went so far as to produce a comic book tract called "The Nervous Witch" about two teenage girls who get seriously involved in occult witchcraft and become demonically possessed as a direct result of reading Harry Potter books. [19]

It has also been argued that when Pope Benedict XVI was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he also condemned the books in a letter expressing gratitude for the receipt of a book on the subject, stating they are "a subtle seduction, which has deeply unnoticed and direct effects in undermining the soul of Christianity before it can really grow properly." [20] Monsignor Peter Fleetwood, a Vatican priest, wrote that these remarks were misinterpreted, and that the letter was likely to have been written by an assistant of the then-cardinal.[21]

Owing to the very nature of the books and the matter-of-fact way in which Rowling addresses the use of magic, the series has been a frequent target of banning and censorship in libraries. The series taken as a whole is in the list of the top 100 most frequently challenged books at libraries (i.e. books that have been requested to be banned), currently listed at number seven on this list. [22]

The series garnered more controversy with its most recent release, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when a grocery store in Canada accidentally sold several copies of the sixth Harry Potter book before the authorized release date and the Canadian publisher, Raincoast Books, obtained an injunction from the Supreme Court of British Columbia prohibiting the purchasers from reading the books in their possession. This sparked a number of news articles questioning the injunction's restriction on fundamental rights. Canadian law professor Michael Geist has posted commentary on his weblog. [23] Richard Stallman has posted commentary on his weblog calling for a boycott until the publisher issues an apology.[24] Some versions of this creed have been circulated by email including a spoiler for one of the major plot points in the novel; whether this was actually the original posted version and was modified by Stallman is as yet unclear, though the tone of the sentence is substantially the same as that of the rest of the message.