Colegiul Naţional “Ienăchiţă Văcărescu”
J.K. ROWLING
Profesor coordonator: Vanda Ursache Elev: Daniel Pîrvan
TÂRGOVIŞTE 2015
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................ 2
CHAPTER ONE - BEGINNINGS....................................................................................... 3 1.1 Birth and family............................................................. ............... 3 1.2 Childhood and education............................................................... 3 1.3 Teenage years................................................................................. .4
CHAPTER TWO - STRUGGLE AND REJECTION............................... ....................... 5 2.1 Inspiration....................................................................................... 5 2.2 Failure............................................................................................. 5 2.3 Rejection......................................................................................... 6
CHAPTER THREE - SUCCESS AND THE HARRY POTTER UNIVERSE................7 3.1 The Books....................................................................................... 7 3.2 The Films....................................................................................... 8
CHAPTER FOUR - LIFE AFTER HARRY POTTER ........................................... 9 4.1 Other Work .................................................................................... 9 4.2 Philanthropy.................................................................................. 10
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................... 12 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................... 13
1
INTRODUCTION
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” J. K. Rowling
We all face struggle at some point in our lives. We find ourselves stuck in situations that we simply cannot cope with alone. This is when we need hope, inspiration and motivation to overcome our darkest moments. This is when we need heroes.
My definition of a hero is someone who inspires, helps the less fortunate, and overcomes personal obstacles. One woman who I think fits this description perfectly is J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved Harry Potter series.
At one time, she could barely pay the rent and care for her daughter, she was chronically depressed and on the verge of giving up on life. Now she is one of the most influential writers in the world and has raised and donated millions to various charities. She has also inspired countless children and adults, including me, to love reading and writing. Although she is among the richest women in Britain and could keep this wealth for herself and her family, she remained grounded and continues to help those in need. The Harry Potter books have helped to rekindle the world’s love of reading. J.K. Rowling’s books have helped me discover not only that reading is fun, but that writing is too. Ever since I read her series, I consider writing to be just as enjoyable as playing computer games or watching movies.
A hero is someone who not only succeeds in his or her own life, but who also uses that success to help others. Heroes are inspirational people who have the ability to change the world. J.K. Rowling has all of these qualities and more, which is exactly why I have chosen this topic. She inspires children and adults alike, and reminds us that reading and imagination are wonderful gifts.
2
CHAPTER ONE BEGINNINGS “ I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”
1.1 Birth and family
Joanne "Jo" Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), a science technician, on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. Her parents first met on a train departing from King's Cross Station bound for Arbroath in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. One of her maternal greatgrandfathers, Dugald Campbell, was Scottish, born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was French, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-leComte during the First World War. Rowling originally believed he had won the Légion d'honneur during the war, as she said when she received it herself in 2009. She later discovered the truth when featuring in an episode of the UK genealogy series “Who Do You Think You Are?”.
1.2 Childhood and education
Her childhood was generally happy, although she does remember getting teased because of her
name, “Rowling” – She recalls often getting called “Rowling pin” by her less than ingenious school friends. J.K. Rowling says she never really warmed to her own name, although, she does remember having a fondness for the name Potter from quite an early age. J.K.Rowling studied at St Michael’s Primary School in Gloucestershire, before moving to Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine.
Rowling's sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was two. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More. Her headmaster at St Michael's, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore. 3
From an early age, J.K. Rowling had an ambition to be a writer. She often tried her hand at writing, although little came from her early efforts. Aged six she wrote a book about a rabbit with measles. After her mother praised her effort.
Rowling replied ‘well get it published then.’ She admits it was a ‘Bit of an odd thing for a child of six to think. I don’t know where it came from…”
Rowling's childhood home, Church Cottage, Tutshill.
Aged nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother worked in the science department.
1.3 Teenage years
Rowling has said that her teenage years were unhappy. Her home life was complicated by her mother's illness and a strained relationship with her father, with whom she is not on speaking terms. Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English". Rowling took A-levels in English, French and German, achieving two As and a B and was Head Girl.
In her own autobiography she remembers with great fondness, when her good friend Sean became the first person to give her the confidence that one day she would be able to make a very good writer: “he was also the only person who thought I was bound to be a success at it, which meant much more to me than I ever told him at the time”.
After finishing school, her parents encouraged her to study French at the University of Exeter. She slightly regretted choosing French, saying she would have preferred to study English. However, it was her par ents wish that she study something “ more useful” than English.
After having spent a year in Paris, J.K.Rowling graduated from university and took various jobs in London. One of her favourite jobs was working for Amnesty International, one of the many charities, which J.K.Rowling has generously supported since she attained a new found wealth. 4
CHAPTER TWO STRUGGLE AND REJECTION “I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored,
and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ”
2.1 Inspiration
It was in 1990, that J.K.Rowling first conceived of the idea about Harry Potter. As she recalls, it was on a long train journey from Manchester to London when she began forming in her mind, the characters of the series. At the forefront, was a young boy, at that time not aware that he was a
wizard. The train was delayed for over four hours, but she didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask for one: “To my immense frustration, I didn’t have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask
anybody if I could borrow one.” But she remembers being very enthusiastic, and excited about the ideas which were filling her mind. On arriving at her flat in Clapham Junction, she began work on writing the book immediately, although, it would take several years to come to fruition.
It was also in December of 1990 that J.K.Rowling lost her mother, who died of Multiple Sclerosis. J.K.Rowling was very close to her mother, and she felt the loss deeply. Her own loss gave an added
poignancy to the death of Harry Potter’s mother in her book. She says her favourite scene in the Philosopher’s Stone is, The Mirror of Erised, where Harry sees his parents in the mirror.
2.2 Failure
In 1991, J.K.Rowling left England to get a job as an English teacher in Portugal. It was here that she met her first husband, Jorge Arantes – and together they had a child Jessica. However, after a couple of years, the couple split after a fierce argument; where by all accounts J.K.Rowling was thrown out of the house.
In Dec 1993, Rowling returned to the UK, moving to Edinburgh where she tried to finish her first book. She came back to nothing. She had no job, no finished product and two mouths to feed. She had hit rock bottom. As she struggled with depression, raising a child on her own and living off 5
meager unemployment benefits, she resumed work on her book in cafes while her daughter was asleep. Despite numerous setbacks, she found solace in doing what she loved – writing. In fact, she found that the little she had was enough to be moderately happy. She had ended up in exactly the
position she had feared most and found that it wasn’t that bad. There wasn’t anything left to be afraid of and her work showcased that mindset.
2.3 Rejection
When Rowling finally finished the first three chapters, she sent the manuscript off to a publisher – They quickly passed on the project. She sent it to another publisher. Again, the answer was no. Her mailbox filled up with r ejection letters, but she didn’t let it stop her.
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.” — J.K. Rowling
After sending her manuscript to 12 different publishers and getting rejected by every single
one,
Rowling
began
losing
confidence in her book. Finally, the editor at Bloomsbury Publishing company sat down to read the manuscript. And so did the
editor’s 8 year-old daughter. The little girl loved the opening chapters, and begged to read the whole thing. This made the
publisher agree to publish Rowling’s novel. But Rowling was left with a warning: that she should get a day job, because she wouldn’t make any money writing children’s books. Once Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published, though, she proved everyone wrong.
6
CHAPTER THREE SUCCESS AND THE HARRY POTTER UNIVERSE “ Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
3.1 The Books
Within a few weeks of publication, (1996) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone book sales really started to take off. The initial print run
was of only 1,000 – 500 of which went to libraries. First editions are now said to be worth up to £25,000 each. She also received a grant from the Scottish arts council, which enabled her to write full time. After the books initial success in the UK, an American company Scholastic agreed to pay a remarkable £100,000 for the rights to publish in America.
Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July 1998 and again Rowling won the Smarties Prize.
In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance.
The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000 and broke sales records in both countries. 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all records. Rowling said that she had had a crisis while writing the novel and had to rewrite one chapter many times to fix a problem with the plot. Rowling was named Author of the Year in the 2000 British Book Awards.
7
A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had
developed writer's block, speculations she denied. Rowling later said that writing the book was a chore, that it could have been shorter, and that she ran out of time and energy as she tried to finish it.
The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.
The title of the seventh and final Harry Potter book was announced on 21 December 2006 as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In February 2007 it was reported that Rowling wrote on a bust in
her hotel room at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh that she had finished the seventh book in that room on 11 January 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released on 21 July 2007 and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. The book's last chapter was one of the earliest things she wrote in the entire series.
Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated US$15 billion, and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 73 languages.
3.2 The Films
In 1998, Warner Bros secured the film rights for the books, giving a seven figure sum. The films have magnified the success of the books, making Harry Potter into one of the most recognisable media products. Under the close guidance of J. K. Rowling, the films have sought to stay close to the original plot; also at J. K. Rowling’s request all the actors were British and the films were filmed in Britain. Production took over ten years to complete and all the films have been a success financially and critically, making the franchise one of the major Hollywood "tent-poles" akin to James Bond, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean. The series is noted by audiences for growing visually darker and more mature as each film was released. 8
CHAPTER FOUR LIFE AFTER HARRY POTTER
“I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”
4.1 Other Work
Since the end of her Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling has finished some short stories, she also hinted on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2010, that an 8th book in the Harry Potter series is a possibility.
The Casual Vacancy
In July 2011, Rowling parted company with her agent, Christopher Little, moving to a new agency founded by one of his staff, Neil Blair. On 23 February 2012, Rowling's new agency, the Blair Partnership, announced on its website that Rowling was set to publish a new book targeted at adults. In a press release, Rowling said that her new book would be quite different from Harry Potter. In April 2012, Little, Brown and Company announced that the book was entitled The Casual Vacancy and would be released on 27 September 2012. In its first three weeks of release, The Casual Vacancy sold over 1 million copies worldwide. The Casual Vacancy later became a BBC television drama series which aired in 2014 on BBC One.
Cormoran Strike
Over the years, Rowling often spoke of writing a crime novel. In 2007, during the Edinburgh Book Festival, author Ian Rankin claimed that his wife spotted Rowling "scribbling away" at a detective novel in a café. Rankin later retracted the story, claiming it was a joke, but the rumour persisted, with a report in 2012 in The Guardian speculating that Rowling's next book would be a crime novel.
In April 2013, Little Brown published The Cuckoo's Calling , the purported début novel of author Robert Galbraith, who the publisher described as "a former plainclothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry". The novel, a detective story in which private investigator Cormoran Strike unravels the supposed suicide of a supermodel, sold 1500 copies in hardback (although the matter was not resolved as of 21 July 2013, later reports 9
stated that this number is the number of copies that were printed for the first run, while the sales total was closer to 500), and received acclaim from other crime writers and critics — a Publishers Weekly review called the book a "stellar debut", while the Library Journal's mystery section pronounced the novel "the debut of the month".
After discovering that Rowling and Galbraith had the same agent and editor, Richard Brooks sent the books for linguistic analysis which found similarities, and subsequently contacted Rowling's agent who confirmed it was Rowling's pseudonym. Within days of Rowling being revealed as the author, sales of the book rose by 4000 percent, and Little Brown printed another 140,000 copies to meet the increase in demand. As of 18 June 2013, a signed copy of the first edition sold for US$4,453 (£2,950), while an unsold signed first-edition copy was being offered for $6,188 (£3,950). Rowling said that she had enjoyed working under a pseudonym. On her Robert Galbraith website, Rowling explained that she took the name from one of her personal heroes, Robert Kennedy, and a childhood fantasy name she had invented for herself, Ella Galbraith.
On 17 February 2014, Rowling announced that the second Cormoran Strike novel, named The Silkworm, would be released in June 2014. It sees Strike investigating the disappearance of a writer
hated by many of his old friends for insulting them in his new novel. Rowling has said that she is writing a third in the series.
4.2 Philantrophy
Rowling, once a single parent, is now president of the charity Gingerbread (originally One Parent Families), having become their first Ambassador in 2000. Rowling collaborated with Sarah Brown to write a book of children's stories to aid One Parent Families.
In 2001, the UK anti-poverty fundraiser Comic Relief asked Rowling to submit booklets related to her most famous works for publication. Rowling's two booklets, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, are ostensibly facsimiles of books found in the Hogwarts
library. Since going on sale in March 2001, the books have raised £15.7 million for the fund. The £10.8 million they have raised outside the UK have been channelled into a newly created International Fund for Children and Young People in Crisis.
10
In 2002 Rowling contributed a foreword to Magic, an anthology of fiction published by Bloomsbury Publishing, helping to raise money for the National Council for One Parent Families.
In 2005, Rowling and MEP Emma Nicholson founded the Children's High Level Group (now Lumos). In January 2006, Rowling went to Bucharest to highlight the use of caged beds in mental institutions
for
children.
To
further
support the CHLG, Rowling auctioned one of seven handwritten and illustrated copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a series of fairy tales referred to in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The book was purchased for £1.95 million by on-line bookseller Amazon.com on 13 December 2007, becoming the most expensive modern book ever sold at auction. Rowling gave away the remaining six copies to those who have a close connection with the Harry Potter books.
In 2008, Rowling agreed to publish the book with the proceeds going to Lumos. On 1 June 2010 (International Children's Day), Lumos launched an annual initiative – Light a Birthday Candle for Lumos. In November 2013, Rowling handed over all earnings from the sale of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, totalling nearly £19 million.
In July 2012, Rowling was featured at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in London where she read a few lines from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan as part of a tribute to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. An inflatable representation of Lord Voldemort and other children's literary characters accompanied her reading.
11
CONCLUSION
“ It is our choices... that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities .” J. K. Rowling “By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew”. These are the words of J.K. Rowling –
the author whose book series has been translated into 73 languages, sold millions of copies and accrued over $20 billion through movie adaptations and sponsorships.
J.K. Rowling went from being a jobless single mother living off unemployment benefits to one of the best selling author s of all time. But it didn’t happen over night. She faced rejection and constantly strived for success. She worked hard at her craft before anyone noticed her. That practice, along with strengthening herself against rejection, was what made her work unforgettable. Looking back, the Harry Potter series has earned over $400 million in book sales, and the last movie alone earned $476 million in ticket sales… on opening weekend. She was the first female to become a billionaire author, not that many authors make it that far in the first place.
In my opinion, what makes J. K. Rowling so fascinating is not necessarily the stories she wrote, but her own life story. She is a beacon of hope for everyone who has big dreams but faces constant backlash and discouragement. If you have a dream or a passion and you keep getting rejected or
running into failure, don’t let that stop you. If you’re going through a tough time in your life, but working on something you really believe in, don’t give up. If you do, you’ll never know what could have been. Who knows, you might end up breaking records.
12
BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. J. K. Rowling. Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination. Little, Brown and Company. London, 2015
2. Pamela D. Pollack. Who is J.K. Rowling? . Penguin Group. New York, 2012. 3. http://www.biography.com/people/jk-rowling-40998#after-harry-potter 4. https://www.biographyonline.net/writers/j_k_rowling.html 5. http://www.jkrowling.com/en_GB/ 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling
13
