Harry Potter her publishers to adopt a more gender-neutral pen name in order to appeal to the male members of this age group, fearing that they would not be interested in reading a novel they knew to be written by a woman. She elected to use J. K. Rowling (Joanne Kathleen Rowling), using her grandmother's name as her second name because she has no middle name. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was published by Bloomsbury, the publisher of all "Harry Potter" books in the United Kingdom, on 26 June 1997. It was released in the United States on 1 September 1998
Religious debates over the Harry Potter series Lev Grossman argues that, "Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn't." Grossman goes on to contrast "Harry Potter" with other, more explicitly religious fantasies, such as C. S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia" and J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". J. K. Rowling has repeatedly denied that her books lead children into witchcraft. In an interview with CNN in 1999, she said, "I absolutely did not start writing