Stars Who Struggled Before Making It Big

J.K. Rowling

In the early ’90s, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling had separated from her first husband in Portugal and moved back to England with their infant daughter. As a single mother, Rowling at times found it hard to make ends meet and even ended up on welfare saying that she was as “poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.”

She would often write in coffee shops and after completing Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, she had a hard time finding someone to publish it. She barely could afford the typewriter that she wrote it on and didn’t have enough money to make photocopies of it, so she had to manually type out the entire novel multiple times to send out to multiple potential publishers.