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
Harry Potter influences and analogues Sunday Independent") stated that "there's more than a hint of young Sherlock evident in Harry". The 1986 Charles Band-produced low-budget horror/fantasy film "Troll", directed by John Carl Buechler and starring Noah Hathaway, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sonny Bono, features a character named "Harry Potter Jr." In an interview with M. J. Simpson, Band claimed: "I've heard that J. K. Rowling has acknowledged that maybe she saw this low-budget movie and perhaps it inspired her." However, a spokesman for Rowling, responding to the rumors of a planned remake of the film, has denied that Rowling ever saw it before writing her book.