Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.pdf

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone emerged from the creative mind of J. K. (Joanna Kathleen) Rowling on a train ride from Manchester to London in 1990. Rowling was a single mother of an infant daughter and living on welfare in Edinburgh, Scotland, when she began the novel. Putting pen to paper in a café while her baby, Jessica, napped, Rowling soon skyrocketed to fame and fortune. While she received an advance of only £2,500 (approximately $3,500 American) for the novel from her British publisher, Bloomsbury, she has since become one of the richest women in the United Kingdom. Her first book was published under the original title Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (the book’s American publishers feared that mention of philosophers would scare away young readers and changed the title to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). The book garnered rave reviews in the United Kingdom, where it won the British Book Award’s Children’s Book of the Year prize, as well as the Smarties Book Prize. Critics have compared her to classic children’s writers such as Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, who also fused the traditional adventure story with fantastic elements drawn from myth and legend.