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J. K. Rowling
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As the often told story goes, J. K. Rowling was on the brink of poverty, receiving welfare when her first Harry Potter book catapulted her into a stratosphere of stardom rarely enjoyed by any writer. While accounts of Rowling's destitution have been greatly exaggerated, her story is still something of a rags-to-riches tale not unlike that of her most famous creation.
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In J. K. Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, a young boy has been sent to live with abusive relatives after an apparent accident killed his parents. Harry Potter is unable to get anyone in his new household to tell him about his parents or what happened to them. Then Harry receives a letter in the mail from Hogwarts School, a premier institution of higher learning for witches and warlocks, inviting him to enroll. When Harry attends Hogwarts he learns that his parents ó who were ... magic-users ó died at the hands of the dark wizard Lord Voldemort. Harry must soon confront Voldemort, who is threatening to steal the Philosopher's Stone ó a stone that promises eternal life.
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Something of a publishing phenomenon, J. K. Rowling (born 1966) has sold more than a quarter-billion books from her series of novels about a British boy wizard named Harry Potter. With the wildly popular series, Rowling single-handedly revived the market for children's literature. The books, translated into over 600 languages, spawned a sequence of worldwide box-office movie hits, and were credited with getting an entire generation of children raised on video games, television, and the Internet interested in reading again.
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J. K. Rowling was born in a scrapyard in Bristol, the seventh child in what eventually became a fifteen child family. From an early age, she demonstrated a talent for writing and wordplay, talents that were of little use to her as she was expected to scavenge for old tin cans and tyres by the villainous scrapyard owner, a Mr. Henry Harper Collins. Protests by her family that she would be more efficient if she were able to selectively collect only the good tin cans were ignored. However, she was able to teach herself to read from the ingredients and nutrition information on the labels, and managed to convince a local high school to accept her, based on the quality of her humourous short story Red Kidney Beans in Sugared, Salted Water.
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J. K. Rowling