Originally published 2007, part of a series I did for a biography website. Can’t even remember who now, but it’s long gone.
Joanne “Jo” Rowling writes under the pen name “J. K. Rowling”, has had a personal net worth of just over $1 billion USD. The public knows her best as the author who gave the world the character Harry Potter, which has spawned a whole media franchise. Though she makes her living telling stories of magical fantasy, her own story is no less amazing.
Joanne Rowling was born July 31, 1965, in South Gloucestershire, England, to parents Peter James and Anne Rowling. Together with her sister Dianne, the family moved to the village of Winterbourne, England, when Joanne was four. She was educated at St. Michael’s Primary School, which settings and faculty of the place is said to have been her inspiration for many of the characters and places in the later Harry Potter novels. Her secondary school was Wyedean School and College, and then she moved on to the University of Exeter where she acquired a BA in French and Classics.
Her first career was as a teacher. She moved to Porto, Portugal, to teach English as a second language. In 1992, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes, with whom she had one child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes, in 1993. The couple separated in that same year. She moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be near her sister Dianne, and fell on hard times as a single mother with no support. She is probably the only billionaire in the world to have received public welfare. Throughout this period, she suffered from clinical depression, which was also spurred by the tragic death of her mother from multiple sclerosis.
Her one outlet was writing. Even as a young child, she had had a vivid imagination and had written stories to read to her sister. Throughout her early adulthood, she was working on her first novel, often writing it in cafes after a long walk during which her infant daughter would fall asleep. She even used her grief over her mother and her depression as material to draw writing inspiration from.
She finished the manuscript of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in 1995 and began shopping it around to publishers. Ironically, her book was rejected by an astonishing twelve publishers, before the lucky thirteenth publisher gave her a chance after a year of struggling. That was Bloomsbury Publishers, a small publishing house in London, England, which had recently branched out into children’s books. The editor at Bloomsbury advised Rowling to get a day job, because “she had little chance of making money in children’s books”. The book was at last printed in 1997.
This little book went on to sell an estimated 120 million copies worldwide, as well as winning too many awards to list here. Rowling received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to allow her to continue writing. She began to publish a new novel in the series every year from 1998 to 2000, and every couple of years after. The series is now up to seven novels, each of them getting longer than the last. Rowling is considered to have finished the series and gone on to other works by now.
To say Harry Potter took the world by storm is still putting it lightly. Each of the novels has their own movie either released or scheduled, the series has its own lines of merchandise and video games, and the mere brand of Harry Potter is worth $15 billion USD. Rowling is the highest-earning novelist in history. The series has been translated into 65 languages, making her one of the most-translated authors in history. Fans camped all night to keep their place in line whenever a new novel was released. Finally, the word “muggle”, which in the Harry Potter universe means a mundane person not gifted with magical powers, has entered the Oxford English Dictionary with that definition. No less an accomplished novelist than Stephen King has praised the series. Meanwhile the fame of her series has actually inspired a backlash from religious groups seeking attention, and has prompted others in the United States to proclaim that Joanne Rowling single-handedly revived literacy there.
What is the inspiration that Joanne Rowling can provide us with? Certainly, she has followed her own muse and faithfully followed it, but even those of us without such an equal inner guiding voice can take this away with us: Follow your dream.
