Will Harry Potter be lauded as a literary classic?

By M&C News Jul 17, 2007, 10:39 GMT

There is an interesting article in the Appleton Post-Crescent that addresses this issue. Because the Potter books have been so popular, I think that in 100 years, people will still know of them but kids will be reading something else.

I think of them as what the Oz books were so many years ago. The Oz books are still around, but more people remember the film with Judy Garland than the actual books. Nowadays, kids don’t go reaching for the Oz books to read, they reach for Harry Potter. And in 100 years, I think the same thing will be the case, where they will reach for whatever craze there will be then.

Fans develop out of nostalgia, but once emotion is removed only the words will remain. People a century from now will be saying, “Oh yeah, the Harry Potter books. They were big in their day. I think I might give them a shot.” Followed by, “And that end, it was so obvious. How could they not see it coming? I don’t get what all the fuss was about.”

Of course by then, books will probably be all digital. “Can you believe they actually used paper?” they’ll be saying. The article did make me chuckle, however, when it compared Potter to Finnegan’s Wake, a book that is unreadable and only in print because James Joyce wrote it. Couldn’t they have at least picked Dubliners? That would have been a little better.

Visit the article and see what more was said about this whole thing.