Potter’s popularity

RE “A Young Wiz Nurtured by Literary Forebears,” by Scott Timberg, July 18: Potter mania has produced a journalistic offspring: the Potter Cultural Wars. Harold Bloom, both American creator and defender of the Great Literature canon, denounced the Potter books as very lowbrow, even for children. He is now criticized for being arrogantly elitist in taste and values, toward ordinary readers as well as books.

Bloom would, indeed, be but an academic curmudgeon, attacking children and adults who are young at heart, if he were not goaded to it by journalists who have made grandiose claims for these pleasant popular novels. Timberg quotes popular critics who drag in the inevitable Joseph Campbell for J.K. Rowling’s universality and suggest literary analogies to T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Charles Dickens.

Alas, if the Potter saga had been written directly for the movies, like “Star Wars,” it might not have had to carry the burden of so much critical nonsense. But these are Real Books, by golly, with millions of Real Readers, the People, actually reading them. So we get not only box-office figures but “cultural significance.” Unfortunately.

DAVID EGGENSCHWILER

Los Angeles