J.K. Rowling’s life is a remarkable journey from humble beginnings to immense wealth. Despite facing challenges as a single mother, receiving government support, and numerous rejections from publishers, she found her writing talent and became one of the most famous authors of all time. In addition, she gifted us with the enchanting world of Harry Potter.
It all started when JK came to Paris to do her graduation and fell in love with the city’s beauty. After graduating college, she moved to London, where she worked as a secretary. Still, she needed to be more organized and often found herself scribbling for ideas for her next story. Even though Jake Rowling had been writing her entire life, it wasn’t until she was 25 years old that she finally found the right thing to write about. One day, she was on a four-hour delayed train trip from Manchester to London. A story idea about a young boy who didn’t know he was a wizard and would go to a Wizarding school was revolving around her mind.
Her mind was flowing with all these ideas about the Harbor Wizarding School, the four houses there would be, and the friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley that Harry would go on an adventure with. And what subjects they were going to teach, and who the headmaster was. She had never felt more excited and knew that was the thing she was destined to write.
Then, a few months later, her mother passed away after suffering from multiple sclerosis for ten years. Her mother’s death sent the 25-year-old Rowling into an emotional tailspin. She had never told her mother about her new book idea, which she regrets even to this day.
JK started using her pain and channeled her feelings into Harry’s loss, giving them even more detail than before. JK Rowling was desperate to escape her pain. So she took all her notes and moved to Portugal after seeing an ad for a teaching position. She taught English at night and began writing during the day.
She later married television journalist Jorge Ranes and Soon gave birth to her first daughter, Jessica, but the marriage was unhealthy. It ended shortly after Rowling packed up her daughter with a suitcase containing the first three chapters of what would later become Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She returned to the UK to live near her sister in Edinburg.
Rowling saw herself as a failure. She was jobless with a dependent child and a failed marriage. She was diagnosed with clinical depression and struggled as a single mother trying to survive on government welfare. JK was as poor as it was possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. But Rowling had a daughter she adored, a note typewriter, and a big idea; for her, that was enough. She saw her failure as an opportunity to direct all her energy into finishing her book. Hitting Rock Bottom became the foundation on which she began to rebuild her life. Over the following years, Rowling started to create an entire magical world of wizards and witches while mapping out the seven books of the Harry Potter series.
The time came when JK Rowling finally finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone. She went to 12 different publishers, all of which rejected her book. But Rowling didn’t give up. Thirteen turned out to be the lucky number for her. Bloomsbury published her book in June 1997.
The decision to publish Rowling’s book was mainly due to the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to read by her father and instantly fell in love with Harry Potter. The book was published under Rowling’s pen name JK Rowling.
Since she was a female author and the publisher thought that the target audience: young boys, wouldn’t want to read a book written by a woman, JK didn’t have a middle name, so she chose her favorite grandmother’s name, Kathleen, and used the initial K as her middle name. Harry Potter: the philosopher’s Stone had an initial print run of only 1000 copies, with 500 distributed to libraries.
But the book was a hit. Rolling soon won her first award as an author, followed by multiple other awards. Soon publishers in the US were anxious to publish her book. An auction was held for the rights to publish the novel, with Scholastic winning and soon publishing the book with a different title in the US, Harry Potter, and the Sorcerer’s stone. With the earnings from the auction, J Rolling was finally able to buy her own apartment.
Harry Potter became a global sensation. The pressure became overwhelming at times for her. She never thought her book would be so successful in a million years. During her second tour in the US, she saw a massive line of people as she was driving to the event that went on for blocks, and it was all for her. She signed 2000 books, and the line still had yet to end.
It was at that moment that JK knew it was getting crazy. A year later, her second book, Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets, was published, followed by her third and fourth books, each about a year apart. Warner Brothers soon purchased the film rights for the first two books, followed by all the others.
JK always supported charities, but now that she had enough money, she decided to launch her charities to combat poverty and social inequality. She also contributes a significant amount of money to the research and treatment of multiple sclerosis, from which her mother suffered and died.
After her fourth book, Rowling kept writing. She published two short books in 2001, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them and Acquitted through the ages. All the profits from the two books went to charity. That same year, the film of the first Harry Potter book was released by Warner Brothers, and JK Rowling received the order of a British Empire from the Prince of Wales for her services to children’s literature.
Rowling had already risen to fame with her famous books when she met and married her second husband, Dr. Neil Murray. Soon after, her son David was born while writing the fifth Harry Potter book. During David’s early infancy, JK ceased working for a while in her novel to care for him shortly after her fifth and longest book, Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix, was published. Forbes named Rowling the first person to become a billionaire by writing books and the second richest female entertainer. However, Rowling disputed Forbes’s calculations and said that although she had plenty of money, she was not a billionaire. JK’s third and youngest child, Mack, was born six months before the release of her sixth book, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in July 2007. The book sold 11 million copies on its first day, making it the fastest-selling book of all time. The book’s last chapter was one of the first things JK Rowling wrote in the whole series.
In 2011, Warner Bros released the final movie of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter in the Deathly Hallows part two. JK had long promised that encyclopedias would go over everything from the wizarding world, so she launched her digital company, Pottermore. This new website allowed Harry Potter fans to get sorted into their house, take quizzes and read bits of information about the Harry Potter universe. Also, She published her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, which was later turned into a television drama mini-series. The following year, Rowling started writing crime novels under the pseudonym Robert Gal. The first book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was published, and it was a while before anyone knew the Troy entity behind the new author.
A total of four books from the series have since been published. She also made her screenwriting debut when Warner Brothers extended her contract to produce the movie Fantastic Beasts and where to Find them. Then, after Jake Rowling started collaborating with Famous Playwrights, the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened in London.
The book was released shortly after, and Rowling’s New book Ichabog was published online for free, with the print version of the book being scheduled for the future. In just a few years, JK Rowling went from living on welfare and feeling like a failure to publishing her groundbreaking book and building her empire.
More than 500 million Harry Potter books have been sold worldwide. She’s now known worldwide because of her books, movies, merchandise, and Play. And even the wizarding world of Harry Potter, an area in Universal studios in different parts of the world. As JK Rowling famously said during her commencement speech at Harvard University, it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.