Background

John Grisham was born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the United States of America. He is the second born child of the five siblings in his family. Although they lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and insisted that he prepare himself for college. John’s father, John Grisham Sr. worked as a construction worker and a cotton farmer; his mother, Wanda Skidmore Grisham was a homemaker.

John’s childhood ambition was to be a baseball player. When Grisham was four years old, the family began following his father’s construction jobs, eventually settling in 1967 in Southaven, Mississippi.

Education

John graduated from Southaven High School in 1973 and enrolled in Northwest Junior College, Senatobia, Mississippi. The next year he transferred to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and tried out to play baseball there. Later, John and his friends left Delta State at the end of the semester and went to Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi.

He had transferred from two colleges and he did not have very good grades. Almost immediately, he changed his major to economics. In his first economics class, he witnessed a class discussion of students and the instructor in which the students were articulate, prepared, and unafraid of confronting the professor. He wanted to be part of that. He wanted to grow up and learn. He discovered that he preferred accounting to economics. His grades were salvageable. With hard working, he thought he could succeed. He also had thoughts of attending law school. John Grisham graduated with a B.S. in accounting from Mississippi State University in 1977.

Grisham then studied tax law at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Discovering that he did not like that specialty, he changed to criminal law. He graduated in 1981 with a law degree.

Career

After graduating from the University of Mississippi law school, he returned to Southaven and was admitted to the state bar in Mississippi in 1981 and practiced until 1990. He was elected as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from January 1984 until September 1990. Grisham represented the seventh district, which included De Soto County. By his second term at the Mississippi state legislature, he was the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee and a member of several other committees.

While serving in the Mississippi House, he observed a trial in the De Soto County Courthouse that changed his life. He heard the testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim. He began exploring what would have happened if the girl’s father had killed her assailants. With the trial for the storyline and Steinbeck’s clear, clean writing style as a model, Grisham wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill. Most of the writings he did before going to the office and during courtroom recesses. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before «Wynnewood Press», an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000-copy printing. It was published in June 1989.

Although «A Time to Kill» sold a disappointing 5,000 copies, Grisham had already begun work on a second novel «The Firm». At the same time, bored with the routine of the state capital and eager to spend more time with his family, he decided not to seek re-election to the state legislature. He closed his office in Southaven and moved his family to Oxford, Mississippi, hoping to concentrate on his writing.

Since 1988, Grisham has written one book per year. His breakaway success came with his second novel, «The Firm». In 1990, before the novel was published, Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights for $600,000. That same year, he resigned from the House of Representatives and bought a farm near Oxford, Mississippi.

Since then, Grisham has gone on to be recognized as one of the world's bestselling novelists. In addition to A Time to Kill and The Firm, his titles include The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, and The Rainmaker, each of which has been scripted into immensely successful film versions. His most recent novels are The Partner (1997), The Street Lawyer (1998), The Testament (1999), and The Brethren (2000).

In August 1994, he expanded his list of job titles to include publisher as well, when he rescued The Oxford American, a struggling magazine based in the town of its title, from financial destitution. In 2000, Grisham published A Painted House serially in the magazine. The novel, set in 1952 Arkansas, is, as Grisham readily admits, a departure from his usual style of novel. In a letter to readers, he writes, “A Painted House is not a legal thriller. In fact, there is not a single lawyer, dead or alive, in this story. Nor are there judges, trials, courtrooms, conspiracies or nagging social issues.” The novel was published as a single volume edition in 2001. Other departures from his legal thrillers include Skipping Christmas (2001), which was adapted into the motion picture Christmas with the Kranks (2004), and Bleachers (2004), a semi-autobiographical book about high school football.

In the spring of 2001, it was reported that Grisham had written the screenplay for the film Mickey, about the world of Little League baseball. Grisham also is serving as producer for the movie, which is being directed by Hugh Wilson and stars Harry Connick, Jr. Grisham continues to write legal thrillers, the most recent of which are The Summons (2002), The King of Torts (2003), The Last Juror (2004), and most recently, The Broker (2005).

He divides his time between a home in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Oxford, Mississippi.

Achievements

• 

  John Grisham's first best-seller, ‘The Firm’, released in 1991 and sold over than seven million copies worldwide. It became the first best-seller of the year 1991 and is known as his most widely-recognized novel. The book was adapted for a feature film of the same title, starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. It was also adapted for television in 2011. Many of his novels have been translated into 29 languages.
  
  In 1993, his third novel, ‘The Pelican Brief’ became an international best-seller. A film adaptation of the same was released the same year starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts.
  
  His fourth novel, ‘The Client’, which was published in 1993, earned him widespread acclaim. The novel became so successful that it was adapted for film the very next year, starring Susan Sarandon. The film also became a huge hit, which went on to spawn a television series that ran from 1995 to 1995.
  
  Here is the list of awards and recognition that John Grisham has received, as follows: 1993 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award in 2005, Galaxy British Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction in 2009, The inaugural Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for The Confession in 2011, Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for Sycamore Row in 2011, 2014 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for Sycamore Row.

Works

More photos

• audio book

  • The Firm

    (At the top of his class at Harvard Law, he had his choice...)

    2009

• book

  • The Brethren

    (Meeting daily in the prison law library, taking exercise ...)

    2010
  • The Reckoning

    (October 1946, Clanton, Mississippi Pete Banning was Clant...)

    2018
  • Theodore Boone

    (The thrilling young mystery series from internationally b...)

    2011
  • Gray Mountain

    (The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wa...)

    2014
  • The Testament

    (Because Troy Phelan’s new will names a sole surprise heir...)

    2010
  • Calico Joe

    (The kid from Calico Rock, Arkansas, dazzles Chicago Cubs ...)

    2012
  • The Tumor

    (Grisham takes readers through a detailed account of Paul’...)

    2016
  • Theodore Boone

    (When we last saw Theo Boone, he ensured that justice was ...)

    2011
  • The Guardians: A Novel

    (In the small Florida town of Seabrook, a young lawyer nam...)

    2019
  • The Street Lawyer

    (Michael Brock is billing the hours, making the money, rus...)

    2010
  • The Broker

    (What no one knows is that the President issues the pardon...)

    2010
  • Camino Island

    (Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort...)

    2017
  • The Last Juror

    (In 1970, one of Mississippi's more colorful weekly newspa...)

    2004
  • Theodore Boone: The Scandal

    (Thirteen-year-old Theodore Boone knows every judge, polic...)

    2016
  • Rogue Lawyer

    (On the right side of the law - sort of - Sebastian Rudd i...)

    2015
  • A Painted House

    (Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kep...)

    2004
  • The Partner

    (Then Patrick Lanigan stole ninety million dollars from hi...)

    2015
  • The Racketeer

    (In the history of the United States, only four active fed...)

    2013
  • The Rooster Bar

    (Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the wor...)

    2017
  • The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

    (In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to...)

    2006
  • The Litigators

    (The partners at Finley & Figg often refer to themselves a...)

    2011
  • The suspense never rests in John Grisham’s pulse-pounding new legal thriller. 2019
  • The Whistler

    (Lacy Stoltz is an investigator for the Florida Board on J...)

    2016
  • The Summons

    (Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virg...)

    2010
  • Theodore Boone: The Accomplice

    (Theo has been worried about his good friend Woody Lambert...)

    2019
  • The Runaway Jury

    (Every jury has a leader, and the verdict belongs  to him....)

    1996
  • Sycamore Row

    (Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He tr...)

    2013
  • The Confession

    (An innocent man is about to be executed. Only a guilty ma...)

    2010

• movie

  • The Rainmaker

    (Francis Ford Coppola directs and scripts an exciting, sta...)

    1997

Religion

Grisham grew up in a religious family, where his parents belonged to the Southern Baptist Church. He describes himself as a «moderate Baptist», and has performed mission service for his church, notably in Brazil. That country provides the setting for one of his novels «The Testament», which has a strong religious theme. He one stated: “I have some very deep religious convictions that I keep to myself, and when I see people using them for political gain it really irritates me.”

Politics

“I was encouraged because we’re mostly Democrats around here, and there was a good turnout. But things only really got exciting in the evening when it became clear that Obama was going to win.” Grisham doesn’t sound excited, though. He may be a lifelong Democrat and a generous party donor, but he was not Barack Obama’s biggest fan. Yet the writer was surprised by the racist reaction to Obama both in the run-up to his 2008 election and four years later. “There are people in the South who would never consider voting for a Mormon because they consider Mormons to be weird. They embraced Romney for one reason: because he was white. That said, there’s so much pride here that we have elected an African American and that he’s a good, smart guy.”

Views

Since Grisham joined the Board of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, he developed the fictional characters and wrote their story in the book titled The Tumor. The Foundation worked with him to provide information about the technology and ensure that everything was accurate. His main goal was to catch interest in order to educate the public about a complex medical technology with many potential applications. By incorporating storytelling, Grisham was able to get readers attention and have them dive into the short book.

Quotations: “I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.”

“I’m not trying to write great literature. I’ll leave that to someone else, and I’m glad they do it because I like to read great literature. But I do what I do. It’s enough for me that when I write something like The Racketeer, about five million people all over the world will read it. When I see someone in an airport lounge or on the beach reading one of my books, it still makes me smile, 30 books on.”

"You want to read about somebody exceptional," he said. "You want to get the reader's attention. You want to tell a story that's never been told, and to do that, you have to jazz it up a bit. Baseball is a game of endless statistics, and it was great fun messing around with some of those numbers."

"When I see something I perceive to be wrong, then I want to shine a light,’ he says. ‘To wrap a story round an issue, that to me is a challenge but also a whole lot of fun."

"I don't think about cliches," he said, "I think about the story, I think about the characters. I want to tell the story, live the story. I'm not here to deliver messages or sermons or give morality tales, I'm here to tell stories."

In his New York Times list of writing tips, Grisham has one more nugget of advice about being consistent: "Write your one page each day at the same place and time. Early morning, lunch break, on the train, late at night  - it doesn't matter. Find the extra hour, go to the same place, shut the door. No exceptions, no excuses."

“In the land of a million lawyers, there’s so many people who face eviction, disaster, loss of benefits, and more … because they don’t have lawyers. And if we can’t protect them, we, as a society, are all diminished.”

Membership

John Grisham is a member of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation that he joined in 2009 under the initiative of his friend Neal Kassell, Chairman of the Foundation.

Grisham is also a member of the board of directors of the Innocence Project, which campaigns to free and exonerate unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence.

Personality

Grisham has a lifelong passion for baseball demonstrated partly by his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the baseball movie Mickey (2004), starring Harry Connick, Jr. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.

He once stated in his interview in 2012 for the article "John Grisham Sets Law Aside In Baseball Novel 'Calico Joe": "I played baseball from the time that I can remember as a little boy, through little league, through high school," he said. "Like all the kids on my street, we were going to play for the Cardinals. We all dreamed of being big league players. Growing up in Arkansas and Mississippi, every small town, every porch, every car, every kitchen had a radio. If the Cardinals were playing, everybody knew the score. I can vividly recall playing Little League baseball [on] hot summer nights in Mississippi, and being able to hear three or four radios scattered around the bleachers. You would hear people start clapping or yelling or cheering, not for us on the field, but because the Cardinals had scored."

Physical Characteristics: Height: 6'1" (185 cm)

Interests

• Politicians

  Hillary Rodham Clinton

• Writers

  “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck

• Sport & Clubs

  Baseball, the Mississippi State University’s baseball team

Connections

Grisham married Renee Jones in 1981, and the couple has two grown children together, Shea and Ty. The family spends their time in their home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, and their other home near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Father:

John Grisham Sr.

Mother:

Wanda Skidmore Grisham

child:

Shea Grisham

child:

Ty Grisham

Friend:

Neal Kassell

Grisham's book, The Tumor, was based on a new technology known as focused ultrasound. In about 2009 Grisham's friend Neal Kassell started talking to him about the new technology that he felt could in the future revolutionize therapy. And seven years later Neal, and several other people that he knew, who were also involved with focused ultrasound, convinced Grisham to join the board of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.

Wife:

Renee Jones

Appointed by Governor McAuliffe, Renee serves on the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities as well as the UNC Board of Visitors, the UNC Press Advancement Council, and Carolina Performing Arts.

References

• The John Grisham Story: From Baseball to Bestsellers
  2004
• John Grisham: A Biography
  2012
• Author John Grisham's Official Website