Thrive: 30 Inspirational Rags-to-Riches Stories

J.K. Rowling

Joanne "J.K." Rowling was born in Yate, Gloucestershire, England. Her father was a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer and her mother was a science technician. By the age of six, Joanne was writing fantasy stories and reading them aloud to her younger sister. She spent much of her teenage years depressed, due to her mother's deteriorating health and a strained relationship with her father. Having been rejected from attending Oxford University after high school, Joanne studied at the University of Exeter, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in French and Classics. After graduation, Joanne held jobs as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International and the Manchester Chamber of Commerce.

At twenty-five years old, while waiting four hours during a train delay from Manchester to London, Joanne became inspired. In her mind, she could see so clearly a scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who had no idea he was a wizard. She had never been this excited about an idea for a book before. Her mind flooded with details. Since she didn't have a pen to write, all she could do for the next few hours was think until she returned to her flat. That very night, she began writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Not long after she began writing her novel, Joanne lost her mother after ten years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. This dramatically affected her writing. Depressed and wanting to escape from England, Joanne moved to Portugal to work as an English teacher at a language institute. Her new working hours allowed her to write during the day, while teaching in the afternoons and evenings. She married a Portuguese man and gave birth to a daughter, Jessica. The marriage didn't last. Joanne is said to have suffered from domestic abuse, even having to obtain a restraining order against her husband after he threw her out of their apartment one evening.

After Portugal, Joanne and her daughter moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, and lived on welfare. Jobless with a baby daughter to take care of, Joanne felt like a failure. She even contemplated suicide. Despite all of her struggles, she continued writing, often in cafes after her daughter fell asleep. After five years of writing, she typed her final manuscript on an old manual typewriter and sent the first three chapters to literary agents. After a number of rejections, one literary agent, Christopher Little, asked for the full manuscript after an enthusiastic reader on his team highly recommended her work. Little later agreed to become her agent.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was originally submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. After a year of collecting dust, Joanne's manuscript was confirmed to be published by Bloomsbury, a publishing house in London, England. Barry Cunningham, an editor at Bloomsbury, gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, who loved it and asked to see the rest of it. Joanne was given an advance of £1,500 pounds from Bloomsbury, with a first printing of 500 copies. She was ecstatic. Joanne was going to become a published author, under the pen name J.K. Rowling, because Cunningham believed young boys did not like to read books written by women. Cunningham also advised Joanne to "get a day job, because there is very little chance of making money in children's books."

Joanne made an application to the Scottish Arts Council and received a generous grant of £8,000 pounds, which she used to focus on writing the next book in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Little then organized an auction for the American publishing rights of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. One bidder, executive director Arthur A. Levine of Scholastic Books, was highly enthusiastic about the book and won the auction, offering $105,000 for the rights. The book was published in the United States the following year, in 1998, and became a massive success, selling millions of copies worldwide.

J.K. Rowling has written seven books in the Harry Potter series, and, according to Guinness World Records, the series has sold over 400 million copies worldwide, with Joanne as the "first billion-dollar author" in history, having grossed over $1 billion from her novels and other related earnings.