At the time of the fateful trip, Rowling was an aspiring writer whose previous attempts at fiction had never been submitted for publication. It took several years for her to complete Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, during which time she grappled with a number of major life changes (the death of her mother; a move to Portugal; marriage; the birth of her daughter; and her divorce from her first husband).

Finally, she had a complete manuscript, along with plans for six more books, and the rest is publishing history. J. K. Rowling's first book (published in the U.S. as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) captivated readers around the world -- and not only nine to eleven-year-old readers, but their siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, and pretty much anyone else who could hold a book and turn pages. It also won England's National Book Award and the Smarties Prize for children's literature.

Harry Potter became an international sensation, and rags-to-riches stories in the press emphasized that Rowling was on welfare when she wrote the first book in the series. She has since explained that she received public assistance only briefly after returning from Portugal to the U.K., until she found a teaching job that paid well enough to cover her child-care expenses. In any case, it's clear that Rowling has climbed from modest circumstances to staggering wealth; in 2004, Forbes estimated her fortune at £576 million, which in U.S. dollars makes her the first person ever to become a billionaire from writing books.

Fame, as Harry Potter himself could attest, is sometimes a mixed blessing. "I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen," Rowling once told BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxton. "Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales' secretary. You know, I didn't think they'd rake through my bins, I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses."

According to the same BBC interview, fame and its attendant pressures led to a case of writer's block, and Rowling had a difficult time finishing the fifth book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The delay didn't dampen the ardor of her fans, many of whom poured their energies into fan fiction, elaborate web sites, and jubilant midnight parties when the book was finally released.

That furor was redoubled in the buildup to the July 2005 release of book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which shattered Rowling's own bookselling records in its first week in release, and prompted another wave of praise from readers and critics. In her New York Times review of the penultimate volume in the saga, Michiko Kakutani called the series "a richly imagined and utterly singular world, as detailed, as improbable and as mortal as our own."

A series of successful film adaptations has extended Harry Potter's reach on the cultural imagination. Even Muggles who have never set foot in the fictional environs of Hogwarts know something about Harry, Hermione and their Quidditch-playing pals.

Not everyone has been delighted with the Potter phenomenon: some Christian fundamentalists are uneasy with Rowling's take on sorcery, and some critics (notably Harold Bloom and A. S. Byatt) find her books lacking in literary merit.

But while it may be impossible to please everyone, the Harry Potter books certainly come close. In one of them, a friend of Harry's exclaims, "Some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed."

"That old witch," added Wendy Doniger in the London Review of Books, "must have been called Rowling."

  (Gloria Mitchell)

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Good to Know
Rowling's parents met on a train, coincidentally from King's Cross station to Scotland. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Rowling was 15, her mother died in the early 1990s. Rowling has a sister, Di, two years younger than she, who is an attorney.

Rowling's publisher requested that she use initials on Harry Potter covers, concerned that if they used an obviously female name, the target audience of young boys might be hesitant to buy them. Rowling adopted her grandmother's middle name, Kathleen, for the "K".

Rowling made a special guest appearance as herself on the hit cartoon show, The Simpsons.

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Interview
Excerpted from the May/June 2000 issue of Book magazine.

Almost as soon as Barry Cunningham met J. K. Rowling in 1996, the first-time author was talking about what she wanted to do next. And next and next. Cunningham, editorial director at Bloomsbury Children's Books in London, had recently agreed to publish Rowling's initial effort, an overlong children's novel about an aspiring wizard. "At our first meeting," he recalls, "before we finished the first course in the restaurant, we had one of those conversations that you remember years later."

"How do you feel about sequels?" Rowling asked Cunningham.

"When a first novelist says that to an editor," he says now, "you're always slightly worried."

Cunningham pointed out that the first book hadn't even been published yet, but Rowling replied that she had seven books in mind. "She was obviously bursting to say it," he says. "And what convinced me that we were on the right track is that she knew what Harry was going to do every successive year of his life until he left school."

That intricacy is at the heart of what has turned into the biggest book story bridging the millennia. Rowling's wizard Harry Potter and his elaborately complete world have become, in three short years, ubiquitous, breaking through every conceivable barrier.

In the London Underground recent Saturday afternoon, a small boy exclaimed to his brother, "Look, it's Harry Potter," upon spying a reader (me) several decades his senior reading one of the books. We spent the next five minutes discussing the relative merits of the series' first and second books. Later, I tried to recall the last time I'd had a literary exchange with strangers on the tube, let alone junior strangers. The answer was never.

Rowling's success has turned nonreaders into Harry addicts, and Potter books have taken the top three spots in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today adult bestseller lists. Forbes magazine's Celebrity 100 list places Joanne Kathleen Rowling (35 this July) as the 24th-highest celebrity earner in the world, wedged between Michael Jordan and Cher at $40 million earned in the past year. Around the world, her books have sold 30 million copies and have been translated into 35 languages. Sophisticated French students and Japanese women alike can't get enough of the budding wizard, who wasn't even on the scene until 1997. And in a world where one might say the highest form of flattery is a lawsuit, Rowling has earned that, too.

"Her great achievement is not to overdraw or overdescribe the characters," says Stephen Fry, the actor-writer-comedian and all-around Renaissance man who won the task of reading the first book when the British version went to audio. Fry was meticulous in familiarizing himself with the text. "I have to confess that I first read it to prepare for reading it aloud," he says. "So I started off paying attention to how the characters would sound. By about page three, I had forgotten all that and was having too much fun reading."

Jamie Jauncey, children's author and chairman of the Scottish Arts Council's children's book awards, believes that the series could have been written at any time in the past 60 years, with its timeless themes of magic and good versus evil. In addition, there is its always-popular anti-adult stance, pitting the Hogwarts children against the unimaginative adult world outside. "She has done what Roald Dahl does," says Jauncey. Like the author of Fantastic Mr. Fox and James and the Giant Peach, Rowling never betrays any sense of being an adult writing down to children. "She steps into the children's shoes as she writes," he says. But most of all, "the story just bursts onto the page with sheer, raw imaginative power."

That's what comes up again and again. "So imaginative." "Original." "Surprising." "Made me laugh out loud." Even Kevin Casey, the lawyer handling a recent suit filed against Rowling, which claims she's not so original after all, says his family loves the books. "Have you read them?" he asks. "They're great."

Rowling's first three books tell the story of ten-year-old orphan Harry Potter, who lives with his dull, smug Muggle (nonmagical) relatives, the Dursleys, until he is informed he is a wizard and is whisked off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry becomes a year older in each successive book and endures all manner of adventures alongside his chums, bookish Hermione Granger and plucky Ron Weasley, while they all learn magic. Reader after reader acknowledges that the series, deceptively simple in summary, offers a density of detail and characterization --- along with the complex balance of good and evil and darkness and wit, and the pace of the plots -- that makes it thoroughly addictive. Gavin Wallace, acting literature officer for the Scottish Arts Council, recalls the launch event for book one's Braille edition. "[Rowling] talked to all the kids," he says, and made an empathetic connection with them. "I think she really understands how their imaginations work."

As tends to be the case with overnight successes, Rowling's own story has its fair share of hardship and hard work. Without her determination and penchant for unusual names -- such as "Hogwarts" and "Muggles" -- she might well still be temping in an office or teaching French, still scribbling down stories but reading them to an audience of just two: her daughter, Jessica, and her sister, Di. Rowling's talent and luck, along with the encouragement and imagination of a dedicated cluster of people in London and Edinburgh, Scotland, allowed Harry Potter to end up charming the world into getting out its collective torch and reading under the bedsheets (as Harry himself is wont to do).

Christopher Little, an agent for heavyweight writers such as Simon Singh, (Fermat's Enigma) and Janet Gleeson (The Arcanum), was the first person outside Rowling's circle of friends and family to spot her potential, even though he'd never been involved with children's fiction before. Rowling, typically, tried Little because she liked his name, sending him the first few chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1995. The typewritten pages found themselves perched on top of the pile of dozens of unsolicited manuscripts Little received most weeks.

He read her submission quickly and took only three days to take her on as a client; she was so thrilled, she read his reply eight times. Little had spoken to the new Bloomsbury Children's Book department at the 1995 Frankfurt Book Fair and knew they were looking for something special. "And Harry Potter was different," he says. Different and long. Most children's books are less than 40,000 words long; Philosopher's Stone was at least 65,000.

Cunningham, the editorial director starting the Bloomsbury children's list, saw the manuscript when it arrived from Little in June 1996. "There it was," he says, "a complete world with everything worked out and everything working, a world you could enter into as a child and lose yourself within." Cunningham needed Rowling and Harry to cast their spell over his colleagues. So he handed over the manuscript to Rosamund de la Hey, children's marketing manager.

She, too, was gripped. "It made me laugh out loud and stay up all night reading it," she says. The next day she and a colleague spent all afternoon making copies of the manuscript, stuffing them with Smarties candies and tying a ribbon around each one. These packages were delivered to the company directors whose support would be needed to buy the book. They adored it, and Cunningham bought it the following day.

An impediment to Rowling's sequel strategy was that, despite signing with Bloomsbury, she literally had no money. Fortunately, in early 1997 she received an £8,000 ($13,000) grant from the Scottish Arts Council, which considers children's fiction as important as adult literature. (Rowling's application was graded with exceptionally high marks, according to Wallace: A, A, A-, B+, A-).

Meanwhile, editorial discussions were proceeding about the first book: Should it be so long, and should it be illustrated throughout? The length of the book was reduced only slightly, finally, but Cunningham initially considered sticking with the convention of providing illustration.

"But Joanne felt from the beginning -- and I certainly agreed after I'd chatted to her -- that everybody wanted to have their own Harry in their mind," he says. Similarly, they talked about the cover. Neither wanted an adult fantasy image, so they chose a fun children's cover. Interestingly, every country has its own look for Harry Potter. Rowling's favorite covers come from the Netherlands, where you don't actually see Harry's face. In Britain, an additional "adult version" was released to assuage the concerns of the series' self-conscious older readers.