tale. Divorced, living on public assistance in a tiny Edinburgh flat with her infant

daughter, Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at a table in a cafe during

her daughter’s naps — and it was Harry Potter that rescued her. Joanne Kathleen Rowling

entered the world in Chipping Sodbury General Hospital in Bristol, England, a fitting

beginning for someone who would later enjoy making up strange names for people, places and

games played on flying broomsticks. Her younger sister Di was born just under two years

later. Rowling remembers that she always wanted to write and that the first story she

actually wrote down, when she was five or six, was a story about a rabbit called Rabbit.

Many of her favorite memories center around reading—hearing The Wind in the Willows read

aloud by her father when she had the measles, enjoying the fantastic adventure stories of E.

Nesbit, reveling in the magical world of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, and her favorite story of

all, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.

tale. Divorced, living on public assistance in a tiny Edinburgh flat with her infant

daughter, Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at a table in a cafe during

her daughter’s naps — and it was Harry Potter that rescued her. Joanne Kathleen Rowling

entered the world in Chipping Sodbury General Hospital in Bristol, England, a fitting

beginning for someone who would later enjoy making up strange names for people, places and

games played on flying broomsticks. Her younger sister Di was born just under two years

later. Rowling remembers that she always wanted to write and that the first story she

actually wrote down, when she was five or six, was a story about a rabbit called Rabbit.

Many of her favorite memories center around reading—hearing The Wind in the Willows read

aloud by her father when she had the measles, enjoying the fantastic adventure stories of E.

Nesbit, reveling in the magical world of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, and her favorite story of

all, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.