A Biography of J. K. Rowling; Author Extraordinaire (Essay Sample)

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A Biography of J. K. Rowling; Author Extraordinaire
Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born on July 31st, 1965 and she was destined to become one of the bestselling authors ever through her most prominent works; the Harry Potter series of books. She was born to Anne Rowling and Peter James Rowling in Yate, Gloucestershire, who had married on the year of her birth. She schooled at St Michael Primary school in Winterbourne, whose headmaster served as her motivation for Albus Dumbledore in her books (Kirk, 28). She developed her passion for writing at a young age, as she usually wrote fantasy stories to read to her younger sister (Accio-quote.org, n.p). Secondary education was pursued at Wydean School and College, which was also her mother’s place of work. She took A-levels in French, German and English and was also head girl during her senior years.
She took Oxford University’s entrance exam in 1982 but failed to gain acceptance, leading her to Exeter University to pursue a degree in French and Classics. She graduated in 1986 and started work as a research specialist and bilingual assistant at Amnesty International’s London offices, and after a period, moved to Manchester to work for the Chamber of Commerce. It was in 1990, when her train trip to Manchester was delayed, that the idea of a young wizard boy began forming in her mind, which she began writing the moment her trip was over. In December of the same year, Rowling’s mother died of multiple sclerosis after a ten year battle with the disease, and this would affect how she portrayed Harry’s loss of his parents at a young age.
She moved to Portugal to teach English, where she had a short lived marriage with Jorge Arantes which resulted in her first child, Jessica, in 1993. The marriage was annulled and Rowling returned to the United Kingdom with three complete chapters of the first installation of the Harry Potter hit novels (Parker, n.p). She had no job and a young child provide for, and it is this despairing period that served as inspiration for dementors, soul sucking creatures that appear from the third book of the series (Chaundy, n.p). She enrolled for welfare, and in 1995, enrolled for a teacher’s training program at the Edinburgh University’s School of Education, with the first Harry book completed.
In 1995, she floated the completed manuscript named ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ to a literary agent in Fulham. The manuscript was then submitted to twelve publishers all of which rejected it. One year later, the manuscript was accepted by London based publishers, Bloomsbury, and based on the book’s reception; Rowling received funding from Scotland’s Arts Council that enabled her to solely focus on writing on a fulltime basis. The continued success by the book led to a lucrative deal by Scholastic Inc. to publish the book in the United States, where ‘Philosopher’ was replaced with ‘sorcerer’ in the title.
The sequel was published in June 1998 under the name ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’, and in December 1999, the third book in the chronology, ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ went public. The series continued to garner wide acclaim, and each book managed to win a number of literary awards, and the fourth book to be released was ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of fire’, which was launched concurrently in Britain and the United States and subsequently broke then sales records of both countries. Rowling released the fifth book of the chronology, ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ in 2003 which also broke all sales records.
In 2005, the sixth book was released, named; ‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince’, while the final book, under the name ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, went public in 2007, breaking all records set by its predecessors and becoming the quickest moving novel in history (BBC, n.p). ‘Harry Potter’ currently is a brand that is recognizable and valuable globally, and the books have been adapted into movies and translated into over fifty languages. The Harry Potter series brought Rowling a lot of success, and hers is a true rag – to –riches story, as she moved from surviving on welfare to being a world renowned author in a period of five years. An idea that was born as a result of a delayed train trip has turned out to be one of the most lucrative franchises in the world.
Rowling has since...