In honor of National Book Lovers Day: The origins of 5 bestselling books, from ‘Harry Potter’ to ‘Les Miserables’

Narrative has a way of changing the world. Child labor laws were created just six months after Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was published, per British Library , and Victor Hugo hoped “Les Miserables” would “persuade people to work towards creating a truly equal society,” per State Library Victoria .

In honor of how books can change us for the better — and in honor of National Book Lovers Day — here is what brought about five of the biggest books to hit the shelves.

‘Harry Potter’ by J.K. Rowling

The inspiration for “Harry Potter” came to J.K. Rowling while sitting on a train, traveling from Manchester to London.

“I was sitting there just staring out of the window, and the idea just fell out of nowhere. It was the purest stroke of inspiration I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve been writing about him ever since,” Rowling told ITN a year after the first “Harry Potter” book was published.

For Rowling, as she began the novel, “the single idea was Harry.”

Her initial ideas for the character revolved around him being an unusual boy, “who for 11 years had made very odd stuff happen,” Rowling said.

She continued, “There was plainly mystery about him, but he didn’t know what it was. And then he got the letter that told him that he had a place at Wizards’ school, and I just thought it would be a lot of fun to write.”

In a later interview with Medium in 2023, Rowling explained how she got inspiration for other aspects of the book.

Notably, Hagrid, the half-giant who lives on Hogwarts grounds, “was inspired by a biker Rowling met in the West of England,” and Harry’s closest friends, Hermione and Ron, were inspired by her own friends from college.

‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens

The story of Scrooge, Tiny Tim and visits from didactic ghosts in the dead of night are a staple of the Christmas season, but Dickens’ novella started out much less about the holidays and more about how to handle poverty.

England suffered economically in the mid-19th century and many historians have dubbed the decade in which Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” the Hungry Forties .

In several previous publications, Dickens had begun incorporating social and economic issues into his plots, according to an article entitled “Children in Dickens’s Novels,” published in Arc Journals . Dickens was a “victim of child labour himself.”

An 1842 report on child labor in Britain reflected the climate at the time. It listed working conditions observed in coal mines in several locations across Great Britain, finding that children began working in mines at extremely early ages.

One worker told the men conducting the report, “Fathers carry their children below at four or five years of age.”

Another said, “Children are taken down as soon as they can crawl.”

Dickens’ initial plan was to publish a pamphlet under his own name titled, “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child,” but decided to instead do something with “twenty thousand times the force,” per Penguin Books .

Thus “A Christmas Carol” was born. In an attempt to inspire change, Scrooge becomes a good man, Bob Cratchet gets a raise and Tiny Tim is saved from starvation.

Historians also attribute the soon-after enacted 1844 Factories Act to the waves “A Christmas Carol” made. The act limited the number of hours children could work and made school a part of the workday.

‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins

Inspiration for “The Hunger Games” came to Collins one night as she watched TV.

In an interview with the School Library Journal in 2008, Collins explained, “One night, I was lying in bed, and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage. On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for – I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war.”

“I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way,” she continued. “That’s the moment when Katniss’s story came to me.”

At the time, Collins was finishing up the last book in another series, and she “knew (she) wanted to continue to explore writing about just-war theory for young audiences,” according to a later interview with fellow author David Levithan in 2018.

Collins defined just-war theory in the interview as “an attempt to define what circumstances give you the moral right to wage war and what is acceptable behavior within that war and its aftermath.”

‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand left Russia in 1925 to study film in California. She was disenchanted with the philosophy of the Soviet Union, which led her to write “Atlas Shrugged.” The book follows highly successful innovators and leaders who left society when the government became too oppressive.

The Objective Standard reported that the inspiration for Rand’s biggest hit came during a 1943 telephone conversation with her friend Isabel Paterson, who was a columnist for the New York Herald-Tribune.

Paterson told Rand she had a “duty” to explain her philosophy in a nonfiction book. Some, including The Objective Standard , believe this conversation was about a book Rand was in the process of writing, “The Moral Basis of Individualism,” which was never finished.

Soon after this phone call, Rand began writing a novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” which would demonstrate her own moral philosophy.

In an interview with journalist Mike Wallace in 1959, Rand explained the philosophy “Atlas Shrugged” was based on. “My morality is based on man’s life as a standard of value. And since man’s mind is his basic means of survival, I hold that if man wants to live on earth, and to live as a human being, he has to hold reason as an absolute,” she said.

“That his highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness,” she continued. “And that he must not force other people nor accept their right to force him. That each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own, rational, self-interest.”

‘Les Miserables’ by Victor Hugo

The brutal poverty present in 19th century France inspired Hugo to write “Les Miserables.”

However, in David Bellos’ book , “The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Miserables,” he explains how Hugo actually saw a man being dragged away by the police for stealing a loaf of bread.

NPR added, “He was dressed in mud-splattered clothes, his bare feet thrust into clogs, his ankles wrapped in bloodied rags in lieu of stockings.”

In Hugo’s preface to “Les Miserables,” he writes, “The man was no longer a man in my eyes but the specter of la misère, of poverty.”

That moment shifted the plotline of Hugo’s novel, which was previously centered around Fantine.

Stanford University also reported that three decades before Hugo began writing “Les Miserables,” he found himself stuck in the middle of a violent mob, after General Jean Maximilien Lamarque’s death.

“Hugo was surrounded by barricades and flung himself against a wall, as all the shops and stores had been closed for some time. He found shelter between some columns. For a quarter of an hour, bullets flew both ways,” the article reported.

Stanford suggests that this moment helped Hugo write about the barricades in “Les Miserables” with acute accuracy.