At Exeter University Rowling took her degree in French and spent one year studying in Paris. After college she moved to London to work for Amnesty International as a researcher and bilingual secretary. The best thing about working in an office，she has said，was typing up stories on the computer when no one was watching. During this time，on a particularly long train ride from Manchester to London in the summer of 1990，the idea came to her of a boy who is a wizard and doesn’t know it. He attends a school for wizardry—she could see him very plainly in her mind. By the time the train pulled into King’s Cross Station four hours later，many of the characters and the early stages of the plot were fully formed in her head. The story took further shape as she continued working on it in pubs and cafes over her lunch hours.
In 1992 Rowling left off working in offices and moved to Portugal to teach English as a Second Language. In spite of her students making jokes about her name (this time they called her“Rolling Stone”)，she enjoyed teaching. She worked afternoons and evenings，leaving mornings free for writing. After her marriage to a Portuguese TV journalist ended in divorce，Rowling returned to Britain with her infant daughter and a suitcase full of Harry Potter notes and chapters. She settled in Edinburgh to be near her sister and set out to finish the book before looking for a teaching job. Wheeling her daughter’s carriage around the city to escape their tiny，cold apartment，she would duck into coffee shops to write when the baby fell asleep. In this way she finished the book and started sending it to publishers. It was rejected several times before she found London agent，chosen because she liked his name—Christopher Little，who sold the manuscript to Bloomsbury Children’s Books.
Rowling was working as a French teacher when she heard that her book about the boy wizard had been accepted for publication. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in