In the mid-1990s, J.K. Rowling was a recently divorced single mother living in Edinburgh, surviving on government welfare support, struggling with depression, and writing in whatever spare moments she could find, often in cafes where the walk kept her young daughter asleep in her pram while she wrote longhand.
She had first conceived the idea for a story about a boy wizard years earlier, during a delayed train journey, and had been developing it slowly ever since, carrying the manuscript through a period of genuine financial precarity that left little room or energy for a project with no guaranteed payoff.
When she finally completed the manuscript and began submitting it to publishers, it was rejected by twelve different publishing houses before Bloomsbury agreed to take it on, reportedly convinced mainly by the eight-year-old daughter of one of their editors, who had read the opening chapter and immediately demanded to know what happened next.
The Harry Potter series that followed went on to sell hundreds of millions of copies worldwide and became one of the best-selling book series in publishing history, transforming an author who had been surviving on welfare payments just a few years earlier into one of the wealthiest and most widely read writers alive.