Writing Made Them Rich #1: JK Rowling
Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born in Chipping Sodbury, England in
1965. She began writing at the age of 6 with a story called
'Rabbit', which she never finished.
In high school her favorite subject was English. From High
School, Rowling went to Exeter University where she earned a
degree in French.
After graduating, she spent a year studying in Paris and then
went back to London where she worked in a number of jobs,
including a year with Amnesty International and a short time as
secretary for a publishing company, where she was responsible
for sending out rejection slips.
In the summer of 1990, on a delayed train from Manchester to
London, she came up with the idea of a boy who discovers he is a
wizard. But it would be 7 years before the idea became a book.
In that same year her mother died of Multiple Sclerosis and she
left for Portugal to teach English, hoping to find a way to deal
with her grief.
In October 1992 she married a Portuguese television journalist,
Jorge Arantes. But the marriage lasted just eleven months.
In 1993 she left her husband and returned to England, with the
one legacy of her failed marriage - an infant daughter named
Jessica.
Her life suddenly took a nose-dive. Fighting poverty and
depression, she lived in a mice-infested flat in Edinburgh and
struggled to raise her baby daughter on a welfare check of 70
pounds ($100) a week.
Unable to heat her flat, she sat in caf