The Wizardly Editor Who Caught the Golden Snitch

Upstairs, in the spacious room where the interview takes place, the atmosphere is calmer. Illustrations from classic children's books cover the walls: "Where the Wild Things Are," "Make Way for Ducklings," "Goodnight Moon."

Levine is 45, with short, graying hair and a ready smile that contains just a hint of the cat who got the cream.

He can't talk about what's in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," of course, but he's dying to. Tell him that some Potter-savvy teens have urged you to brush up on the nuances of Horcruxes before plunging in and he laughs infectiously.

"You'd better!" he says.

Levine's life story should be an inspiration to English majors everywhere.

He grew up in Elmont, Long Island, right on the edge of Queens, with a doctor father and a mother who was a teacher and an artist. "I always was an English kind of guy," he says, and he read "really broadly" from an early age. Among many beloved books he mentions are Russell Hoban's Frances stories, Michael Bond's Paddington series and fantasies by Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin.

At Brown he majored in English and creative writing, with an emphasis on poetry. After graduation, he signed up for the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, a well-known first step toward entry-level publishing jobs. When he completed it, the director asked what part of publishing he'd like to be in.

"I said, 'I want to be a children's book editor,' " Levine recalls. "And he said, 'Don't do that. You will never get a job.' " There weren't enough of them, it seemed, and their occupants seemed never to leave.

Here comes that smile again: "I'm glad I didn't listen to that one particular piece of advice." G.P. Putnam's Sons hired him as an editorial assistant a few months later.

For the first decade or so of Levine's career -- during which he also worked at Knopf and Dial -- he mostly did heed another bit of conventional wisdom. The word then was that fiction for children, especially in hardcover, didn't sell.

On one level, this was fine with Levine. He had his mother's love for art and he'd chosen children's books in the first place because "for me, it was poetry and art together." So he made his reputation with picture books.

"I was known for 'Mirette on the High Wire' and 'Officer Buckle and Gloria,' " he says.