Early life and education

John Grisham, the second oldest of five siblings, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda Skidmore Grisham and John Grisham. His father worked as a construction worker and a cotton farmer, while his mother was a homemaker. When Grisham was four years old, his family started traveling around the South, until they finally settled in Southaven, DeSoto County, Mississippi. As a child, Grisham wanted to be a baseball player. Despite the fact that Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged her son to read and prepare for college. He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.

He went to the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland. Grisham drifted so much that he changed colleges three times before completing a degree. He graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a BS degree in accounting. He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1981 with a JD degree.

Marriage and family

Grisham married Renee Jones on May 8, 1981. The couple have two children together: Shea and Ty. The family splits their time between their Victorian home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, and a home near Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 2008, he and his wife bought a condominium at McCorkle Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Career

Before and during college

Grisham started working for a nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for US$1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for US$1.50 an hour. He wrote about the job: "there was no future in it". At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work".

Through a contact of his father's, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at age 17. It was during this time that an unfortunate incident got him "serious" about college. A fight had broken out among the crew on a Friday, with gunfire from which Grisham ran to the restroom to escape. He did not come out until after the police had "hauled away rednecks". He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college.

His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating". He decided to quit but stayed when he was offered a raise. He was given another raise after asking to be transferred to toys and then to appliances. A confrontation with a company spy posing as a customer convinced him to leave the store. By this time, Grisham was halfway through college. Planning to become a tax lawyer, he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.

Law and politics

Grisham practiced law for about a decade and won election as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990, at an annual salary of US$8,000. Grisham represented the seventh district, which included DeSoto 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.

Grisham's writing career blossomed with the success of his second book, The Firm, and he gave up practicing law, except for returning briefly in 1996 to fight for the family of a railroad worker who was killed on the job. His official site states: "He was honoring a commitment made before he had retired from the law to become a full-time writer. Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of US$683,500 — the biggest verdict of his career."

Writing career

Grisham said the big case came in 1984, but it was not his case. As he was hanging around the court, he overheard a 12-year-old girl telling the jury what had happened to her. Her story intrigued Grisham, and he began watching the trial. He saw how the members of the jury cried as she told them about having been raped and beaten. It was then, Grisham later wrote in The New York Times, that a story was born. Musing over "what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants", Grisham took three years to complete his first book, A Time to Kill.

Finding a publisher was not easy. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000-copy printing. It was published in June 1989. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, The Firm, the story of an ambitious young attorney "lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared." The Firm remained on the The New York Times' bestseller list for 47 weeks and became the bestselling novel of 1991.

Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, the author broadened his focus from law to the more general rural South but continued to write legal thrillers. He has also written sports fiction and comedy fiction.

In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

In 2010, Grisham started writing a series of legal thrillers for children aged 9 to 12 years. It features Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old who gives his classmates legal advice ranging from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed. He said, "I'm hoping primarily to entertain and interest kids, but at the same time I'm quietly hoping that the books will inform them, in a subtle way, about law." He also stated that it was his daughter, Shea, who inspired him to write the Theodore Boone series. "My daughter Shea is a teacher in North Carolina and when she got her fifth grade students to read the book, three or four of them came up afterwards and said they'd like to go into the legal profession."

In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book, and his favorite author is John le Carré.

Southern settings

Several of Grisham's legal thrillers are set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, in the equally fictional Ford County, a town still deeply divided by racism. The town and county are, according to a description given in Sycamore Row, located in the northwest of the state of Mississippi. The first of his novels to be set in the town was A Time to Kill. Other stories to be set in and around the town include The Last Juror, The Summons, The Chamber, and Sycamore Row. The stories in the collection Ford County are also set in and around Clanton. It has been suggested that the name "Clanton" may be deliberately suggestive of Klan town", though the name is, according to the author, coincidental.

Other Grisham novels have non-fictional Southern settings, for example The Runaway Jury is set in Biloxi.

Religious views

Grisham has been a Christian since he was 8 years old, and he describes his conversion to Christianity as "the most important event" in his life. After leaving law school, he participated in some missionary work in Brazil, under the First Baptist Church of Oxford. As a Baptist, he is for the separation of church and state, and has 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.”

Political activism

Grisham is a member of the Board of Directors of the Innocence Project, which campaigns to free unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence. The Innocence Project argues that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Grisham has testified before Congress on behalf of the Innocence Project and appeared on Dateline NBC, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, and other programs. He also wrote for the New York Times in 2013 about an unjustly held prisoner at Guantanamo. Grisham opposes the death penalty.

Grisham believes that prison rates in the United States are excessive and the justice system is "locking up far too many people"; from "black teenagers on minor drugs charges" to "those who had viewed child porn online"

The Mississippi State University Libraries, Manuscript Division, maintains the John Grisham Room, an archive containing materials generated during the author's tenure as Mississippi State Representative and relating to his writings.

In 2015, Grisham, along with about 60 others, signed a letter published in the Clarion-Ledger urging that an inset within the flag of Mississippi containing a Confederate flag be removed. He co-authored the letter with author Greg Iles and the pair then contacted various public figures from Mississippi for support.

Other interests

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.

As part of his passion for sports, Grisham is a supporter of Virginia Cavaliers athletics. He has been spotted at various sporting events on-campus and it is believed he gave a $2 million donation to help renovate the Cavaliers' baseball stadium, Davenport Field. His son Ty played baseball at UVA.

In a 2007 interview with Bill Moyers, Grisham revealed that he has been collecting goose eggs all his life, preparing them for Sunday morning family breakfasts before church.

Grisham owns a home in Destin, Florida.

Awards and honors

• 2005 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
• 2007 Galaxy British Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2009 Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
• 2011 The inaugural Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for The Confession
• 2014 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for Sycamore Row

Bibliography

A complete listing of the works by John Grisham

Novels

• A Time To Kill (1989)
• The Firm (1991)
• The Pelican Brief (1992)
• The Client (1993)
• The Chamber (1994)
• The Rainmaker (1995)
• The Runaway Jury (1996)
• The Partner (1997)
• The Street Lawyer (1998)
• The Testament (1999)
• The Brethren (2000)
• A Painted House† (2001)
• Skipping Christmas† (2001)
• The Summons (2002)
• The King of Torts (2003)
• Bleachers† (2003)
• The Last Juror (2004)
• The Broker (2005)
• Playing for Pizza† (2007)
• The Appeal (2008)
• The Associate (2009)
• Ford County (2009)
• The Confession (2010)
• The Litigators (2011)
• Calico Joe† (2012)
• The Racketeer (2012)
• Sycamore Row (2013)
• Gray Mountain (2014)
• Rogue Lawyer (2015)
• The Whistler (2016)

†

Short stories Ford County (2009) The Tumor† (2016) Partners (2016) Non-fiction The Wavedancer Benefit: A tribute to Frank Muller (2002) - with Pat Conroy, Stephen King and Peter Straub The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006) - story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs they Quit (2010) - with various authors

Theodore Boone series Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer (2010) Theodore Boone: The Abduction (2011) Theodore Boone: The Accused (2012) Theodore Boone: The Activist (2013) Theodore Boone: The Fugitive (2015) Theodore Boone: The Scandal (2016)

Adaptations

Feature films

• The Firm (1993)
• The Pelican Brief (1993)
• The Client (1994)
• A Time to Kill (1996)
• The Chamber (1996)
• The Rainmaker (1997)
• The Gingerbread Man (1998)
• A Painted House (2003) television film
• Runaway Jury (2003)
• Mickey (2004)
• Christmas with the Kranks (2004)
• The Associate (TBA) to be directed by Adrian Lyne.
• The Testament (TBA) to be directed by Stuart Blumberg.
• Calico Joe (TBA) to be directed by Jake Kasdan.

Television

• The Client (1995-1996) 1 season, 20 episodes
• The Street Lawyer (2003) TV pilot
• The Firm (2011-2012) 1 season, 22 episodes

[ Source: Wikipedia ]