My 7-year-old daughter went to Hogwarts a few weeks ago. Not, of course, the fictional school for witches and wizards located in some remote corner of Scotland. Not even one of the dedicated theme parks found in Florida, California, and Japan. Her Hogwarts was just down the street from her house, in the basement of a church hosting a week-long Harry Potter-themed theater camp.

The week culminated in the staging of an original play set in the world of Harry Potter, created and acted by campers ages 7 to 12. It was hard to miss the animating spirit of the play: These kids, given a spectrum of more recent fan choices ranging from Hamilton to superhero-themed camps, chose to step into the Harry Potter universe for a week.

Some worlds are built to last, others destined to recede when one generation grows out of them, and only time can sort one from the other. In 1977, even those who recognized Star Wars as a film that would reshape Hollywood couldn’t have expected it to endure as it has, that 2018 kids would connect as strongly with it as those who first saw it more than 40 years before.

The Harry Potter book series ended in 2007, and the film series ended in 2011. Along the way, Harry Potter became a touchstone for a generation that grew up attending midnight book parties with the release of each new installment, the characters of J.K. Rowling’s universe coming of age with a core group of readers who mirrored Harry’s age as each consecutive book was released. The degree to which Harry Potter has become the go-to reference for millennials to understand the world around them has become a subject of parody, but even this is a testament to the series’ stature.

But will Harry Potter be embraced by future generations who grew up after its initial popularity, especially now that its first generation of fans have begun to have kids of their own? Is Harry Potter destined to be like the Beatles, an enduring passion handed affectionately from one generation to the next, or an Engelbert Humperdinck?

My guess is that the series will ultimately last. Part of it is its full saturation into our culture, whether through spinoff movies and books, theme parks, or a whole generation of fans turned parents who are raising their kids on Harry Potter. But I suspect that 20 years later, Harry Potter’s enduring appeal still lies in its ability to capture, with each consecutive novel, the feeling of growing up in an increasingly morally complex universe.

A whole generation of fans turned parents are reading Harry Potter to their kids

Sequels, merchandising, and endless promotion certainly don’t hurt Harry Potter’s popularity — the films are still in constant TV rerun rotation, and a follow-up film series (Fantastic Beasts) and book reissues have all kept the world alive. But the many young adult fantasy franchises born out of the success of the series have failed to reproduce Harry Potter’s magic, proving that no amount of marketing savvy can force a phenomenon that doesn’t want to happen. Eragon, Vampire Academy, and Alex Rider all have their fan bases, but Harry Potter continues to operate in another league.

Nor, maybe most crucially of all, can these Potter-inspired series buy parental enthusiasm. I was 25 when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone first appeared on American shelves, and, like most adults, I didn’t pay much attention at first. I didn’t read that book until a few years later as a bit of due diligence before seeing the film.

I was surprised to find that the books absolutely hooked me. They reminded me of the fantasy stories I’d loved as a kid, which I later learned was deliberate: Rowling drew freely from Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, and many other fantasy writers. But Harry Potter also offered a fresh take on those stories, tethering the magical world more closely to our own. When the final book came out in 2007, my wife and I spent a good chunk of a vacation in a hotel room because we couldn’t imagine venturing outside without first finishing it.

When we became parents, making Harry Potter a part of our daughter’s childhood was less a question of “if” than “when.” As it turned out, we didn’t have to push at all. By around age 6, many of her friends were already fans, either from watching the films, buying the merchandise, or having the series read to them by their megafan parents. When we began reading The Sorcerer’s Stone at bedtime, she was hooked immediately, enthusiastically asking for “one more paragraph!” at the end of each nighttime session.

More than a year later, we’re now deep into the fifth book with no signs of her enthusiasm waning. It helps that Rowling seems to have designed the series as one for kids to grow up alongside. While acknowledging Harry’s tragic backstory, the first entries place the emphasis on magic, monsters, and confrontations between the obviously good and the unmistakably evil. But as Harry gets older, he begins to recognize the world’s complexity, and the Harry Potter books increasingly become tales of conflicting loyalties, loss, corruption, bad fates befalling good people, and disappointment.

The series is ultimately less a story of good vanquishing evil — though, of course, that’s part of it — than of growing older and holding on to hope in the face of despair.

At its core, Harry Potter is a series about growing up

Collectively, Rowling’s books are one of those works of art that provide a glimpse at the world beyond childhood, raising some difficult questions in the process that didn’t necessarily occur to us when reading the books on our own. We dragged our feet as we neared the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, knowing we’d have to talk about poor Cedric Diggory’s death. We’ve been taking breaks for other books between volumes; our post-Goblet break included Charlotte’s Web, figuring we may as well get some more questions about mortality out of the way as long as we’d touched on the subject.

The books have also turned into a conversational go-to, a shared interest that’s become part of the fabric binding our family together. When our daughter gets frustrated as my wife and I natter on about boring grown-up topics, she’s taken to interrupting us by asking, “Want to talk about Harry Potter?” It’s a not-so-subtle attempt to steer us in a more kid-friendly direction, so we try to turn our adult problems into teachable moments by asking how she feels about developments in the story, the choices various characters make, and the consequences of those choices.

Though sometimes we just end up updating her constantly shifting list of her favorite characters, talking about Harry Potter can lead to topics we need to talk about anyway. For a children’s series with faux-Latin spells and flying broomsticks, it paints a world of surprising consequence, where the easy choice is rarely the right choice and the right choice isn’t always easy to discern. As the books reach their conclusion, the protagonists slowly reach one of the most heartbreaking realizations of getting older: that our elders are flawed and fallible and ultimately won’t save us, that we have no choice but to save ourselves.

Will my daughter and other fans of her age end up passing on their love to the next generation? Who’s to say? But while my evidence that it’s found a place in this generation may be anecdotal, it’s strong, and it’s reinforced every night, one plea for one more paragraph at a time.

Keith Phipps is a freelance writer specializing in film, television, and other elements of pop culture, whose work can also be found in Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Ringer, The Verge, Slate, and other publications. He previously served as an editor at the Dissolve, the A.V. Club, and Uproxx. Keith lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Even in retirement, which he began in 2010 after a last act that found him turning out books at an astounding pace, Roth made his presence felt, emerging for the occasional interview to comment on the state of the world from the perspective of a New York retiree who spent his days reading books and watching old movies. (Roth on President Donald Trump, speaking to the New York Times in January of this year: “a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”)

The obituaries running today include such words as “giant” and “lion,” but even these seem insufficient. Born in Newark in 1933, a time and place whose influence would be felt throughout his body of work, Roth embarked on a writing career after spending time at Bucknell University, the University of Chicago, and a brief stint in the Army that ended when he sustained a back injury during basic training.

He published his first collection of stories, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959, winning the National Book Award the following year and establishing a reputation for controversy by addressing themes of Jewish identity and cultural assimilation, occasionally in less than polite terms. It was a preview of things to come.

The acclaim, controversy, and notoriety Roth achieved via that early breakthrough paled to what greeted him with the publication of the 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, a book whose dark humor and sexual frankness helped blow the doors off what was possible in American literature at the end of a decade that saw many of the old rules falling away. Even its cover, by graphic artist Paul Bacon — the title and author’s name in a big, stylized font against a searing yellow background — instantly evokes the era.

But Portnoy’s Complaint was just the beginning of a new phase in Roth’s career, which would find him producing vital, vibrant work for decades to come. With a writer as prolific as Roth, it’s difficult to know where to start, so here are five possibilities (presented with the acknowledgment that five different choices might have worked equally well).

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

For his most famous novel, Roth chose the form of a long monologue delivered to a psychoanalyst. This not only allowed him to end the book with a devastatingly funny punchline but created a context that makes sense of the rawness of protagonist Alexander Portnoy’s rambling reflections on being young, horny, Jewish, and in thrall to an overbearing mother. Portnoy spiels, and sometimes shouts, about his childhood, his desires, and the conflict between his need to be a “good boy” and the urges that make that seem impossible.

The book’s frankness, particularly its detailed and voluminous descriptions of masturbation, made it instantly notorious. (Roth makes it hard to look at liver the same way ever again.) Its humor and insight confirmed him as a major writer, but it’s not, in many respects, representative of the writer he’d become. It’s a cry from the id that, once expelled, allowed for subtler explorations of some of the same themes in later work.

The Ghost Writer (1979) and American Pastoral (1997)

At the end of the 1970s, Roth introduced the recurring character Nathan Zuckerman, who’d serve as a frequent alter ego until Roth laid him to rest with Exit Ghost in 2007. In his first appearance in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman is a young writer still finding his voice and excited to spend the night at the home of the famous author E.I. Lonoff.

But Lonoff’s home, Zuckerman discovers, is not a peaceful one, and his insights into human nature, however profound, have done little to help him find happiness or to avoid an unhappy marriage. Just as confusing to Zuckerman: the presence of Lonoff’s assistant, a young woman named Amy whose mysterious origins prompt Zuckerman to imagine she’s really Anne Frank, having survived the Holocaust and taken to living anonymously in America under an assumed name. It’s a daring device that allows Roth to explore the meaning of Frank’s life and the role of literature while reflecting on his own career.

Zuckerman wouldn’t be Roth’s only alter ego, a group whose number occasionally included a character named “Philip Roth.” But he’s the one Roth would return to most frequently, whether chronicling his own adventures in the literary world — 1981’s Zuckerman Unbound uses Zuckerman to revisit the Portnoy’s Complaint phenomenon — or using him as a melancholy narrator in later novels like American Pastoral.

In Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel, Zuckerman’s attempts to compose a speech for a high school reunion leads him to nothing less than an elegy for lost youth and a whole generation’s unrealized ambitions:

Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I complete mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s pickle barrels? Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred out emotions to an extraordinary extent?

As with Portnoy, Zuckerman allowed Roth to use the particular experiences of one character to explore universal concerns. We all have our equivalent of Tabachnik’s pickle barrels and a youthful Eden to which we can never return, and that realization sets the tone for a story of a different sort of lost paradise that plays out against the background of the turbulent 1960s.

The Plot Against America (2004)

When published, The Plot Against America seemed like a departure for Roth, an excursion into an alternate history that imagined what would happen if fascists, led by Charles Lindbergh, came to power in 1940.

Roth explores the possibility in the most personal way possible, by imagining how it might have affected a fictional version of his own family. The conceit both allows him to explore the persistence of anti-Semitism in American culture and, now chillingly, the ways in which America has failed to immunize itself against demagogues and authoritarians.

Everyman (2006)

Roth ended his writing career with a series of tightly focused novels including this slim, powerful volume about an unnamed, thrice-married, thrice-divorced New Jersey-born protagonist. Opening at his grave, Everyman follows him almost back to the cradle as he recalls a life he now views with regret, reflecting on the many years behind him and the short span ahead.

Roth treats his protagonist sympathetically but views him clearly, and the book ends on a consideration of final things that finds Roth striking a typically unsparing note: “He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.” Even looking death in the face, Roth knew it was his responsibility to not turn away.