On June 26, 1997, a small British publisher called Bloomsbury printed just 500 copies of a kids' book by a writer almost nobody had heard of. The cover showed a boy with round glasses standing in front of a steam train. The book was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and the writer was a single mom named Joanne Rowling, who had asked the publisher to put "J.K." on the cover because she was worried boys might not want to read a book by a woman.
Joanne had come up with the idea on a delayed train ride from Manchester to London in 1990. She didn't have a pen, so she just thought about Harry for hours - the orphan boy, the scar shaped like a lightning bolt, the magical school called Hogwarts. Over the next seven years she wrote at small cafés in Edinburgh, sometimes with her baby daughter asleep next to her, often without enough money for heat. Twelve different publishers turned the book down before Bloomsbury said yes - partly because the chairman's eight-year-old daughter, Alice Newton, read the first chapter and demanded to read the rest right now.
The book quietly grew into a phenomenon. American kids got it in 1998 (renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone), and soon the series exploded into seven books, eight movies, theme parks, plays, and over 600 million copies sold in 80 languages. Today there are Harry Potter readers in space stations and on remote islands. The whole giant wizarding world started with a delayed train, a small notebook, and a writer who refused to give up - even when twelve people told her no.
