Harry Potter

Harry Potter is the title character of J.K. Rowling's seven-volume Harry Potter series, published between 1997 and 2007. Orphaned as an infant when the dark wizard Lord Voldemort murdered his parents and inexplicably failed to kill him, Harry is raised in ignorance of his own magical heritage by his neglectful non-magical relatives until, on his eleventh birthday, he learns he is a wizard and is enrolled at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There he forms a close friendship with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, discovers he is famous throughout the wizarding world for having survived Voldemort's attack as a baby, and gradually learns that he is bound by prophecy to eventually confront Voldemort again. Across the series Harry investigates and battles the returning Voldemort and his followers over seven years at Hogwarts, culminating in a final confrontation in which Harry, having learned he must be willing to die to defeat Voldemort permanently, survives and ends the wizarding world's war. Harry Potter became one of the best-selling and most culturally influential fictional characters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.