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