John Grisham

John Grisham
John Grisham in 2009
Born John Ray Grisham Jr.
(1955-02-08) February 8, 1955
Jonesboro, Arkansas, U.S.
Education Mississippi State University (BS)
University of Mississippi School of Law (JD)
Period 1989–present
Genres Legal thriller
Crime fiction
Baseball
Football
Spouse
Renee Grisham (m. 1981)
Children Shea Grisham (born 1986)[1]
Ty Grisham (born 1983)[1]
Member of the Mississippi House of Representatives
from the 7th district
In office
1984–1990
Personal details
Political party Democratic
Website
jgrisham.com

John Ray Grisham Jr. (/ˈɡrɪʃəm/; born February 8, 1955)[2][3] is an American novelist, attorney, politician and activist, best known for his popular legal thrillers. His books have been translated into 42 languages and published worldwide.

Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. He practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the House of Representatives in Mississippi from January 1984 to September 1990.[4]

His first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it. As of 2012, his books have sold over 275 million copies worldwide.[5]

A Galaxy British Book Awards winner, Grisham is one of only three authors to sell 2 million copies on a first printing, the other two being Tom Clancy [6] and J. K. Rowling[7].

Grisham's first bestseller, The Firm, sold more than seven million copies.[2] The book was adapted into a 1993 feature film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise, and a 2012 TV series which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel."[8]

Eight of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, Skipping Christmas, and A Time to Kill.[9]

Early life

Grisham, the second of five siblings, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham.[4]

His father worked as a construction worker and a cotton farmer, while his mother was a homemaker.[10] When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi.[4]

As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player.[9] Grisham has been a Christian since he was eight years old, and has described 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.[11]

Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college.[2] He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.[4]

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 one of his father's contacts, 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 with gunfire broke out among the crew causing Grisham to run to a nearby restroom to find safety. He did not come out until after the police had detained the perpetrators. 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". 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.[12]

He attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland.[4] Grisham drifted so much that he changed colleges three times before completing a degree.[2]

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.[4]

Career

Law and politics

Grisham practiced law for about a decade and won election as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983–90, at an annual salary of US$ 8,000.[4][13]

Grisham represented the seventh district, which included DeSoto County.[14] 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.[2]

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.[2] His official website 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."[10]

Writing career

This house in Lepanto, Arkansas, was the house used in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie A Painted House.

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.[12]

Musing over "what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants",[10] 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.[2][15]

The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, The Firm. [10] The Firm remained on The New York Times' bestseller list for 47 weeks,[2] and became the bestselling novel of 1991.[16]

Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, Grisham broadened his focus from law to the more general rural South but continued to write legal thrillers. He has written sports fiction and comedy fiction. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the 2004 baseball movie Mickey, which starred Harry Connick Jr.

In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, which is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.[17]

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."[18]

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."[18]

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.[19]

In 2017, Grisham released two of his legal thriller books. “Camino Island” was published on June 6, 2017.[20] However, “The Rooster Bar”, published on October 24, 2017, was called his most original work yet, in The News Herald.[21]

Southern settings

Several of Grisham's legal thrillers are set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, in the equally fictional Ford County, a northwest Mississippi town still deeply divided by racism. The first novel set in Clanton was A Time to Kill.

Other stories set there 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. Other Grisham novels have non-fictional Southern settings, for example The Runaway Jury and The Partner, are both set in Biloxi, and large portions of The Pelican Brief in New Orleans.

A Painted House is set in and around the town of Black Oak, Arkansas, where Grisham spent some of his childhood.

Personal life

Marriage

Grisham married Renee Jones on May 8, 1981. The couple have two children together: Shea and Ty.[4] Ty played college baseball for the University of Virginia.[22]

Real estate holdings

The family splits their time between their Victorian home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi,[10] a home in Destin, Florida[23] and a condominium at McCorkle Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, purchased in 2008.[24]

Religion

As a Baptist, he advocates the separation of church and state.[25] He once said, "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."[26]

Baseball

Grisham has a lifelong passion for baseball demonstrated partly by his support of Little League activities in both Oxford and in Charlottesville. In 1996, Grisham built a $3.8 million youth baseball complex.[27]

As he notes in the forward to Calico Joe, Grisham himself stopped playing baseball after a ball thrown by a pitcher nearly caused him a serious injury. This experience left Grisham with an abiding dislike of pitchers.

He remains a fan of Mississippi State University (MSU)'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.

Since moving to the Charlottesville area, Grisham has become a supporter of Virginia Cavaliers athletics and is regularly seen sitting courtside at basketball games.[28] Grisham also contributed to a $1.2 million donation to the Cavalier baseball team in Covesville, Virginia, which was used in the 2002 renovation of Davenport Field.[29]

Political activism

Grisham is 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.[30]

The Innocence Project contends 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.[31]

He has appeared on Dateline NBC,[32] Bill Moyers Journal on PBS,[33] and other programs.

He wrote for The New York Times in 2013 about an unjustly held prisoner at Guantanamo.[34]

Grisham opposes capital punishment, a position very strongly manifested in the plot of The Confession.[35][36][37][38]

Grisham believes that prison rates in the United States are excessive, and the justice system is "locking up far too many people". Citing examples including "black teenagers on minor drugs charges" to "those who had viewed child porn online", he controversially added that he believed not all viewers of child pornography are necessarily pedophiles. After hearing from numerous people against this position, he later recanted this statement in a Facebook post.[39][40][41]

The Mississippi State University Libraries, Manuscript Division, maintains the John Grisham Room,[42] an archive containing materials generated during the author's tenure as Mississippi State Representative and relating to his writings.[43]

In 2012, the Law Library was renamed in his honor. It had been named for more than a decade after the late Senator James Eastland.

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.[44] He co-authored the letter with author Greg Iles; the pair contacted various public figures from Mississippi for support.[45]

Awards and honors

Recurring characters

Jake Brigance

A lawyer and the main protagonist of A Time to Kill and its sequel Sycamore Row. In the film adaptation of A Time to Kill, Brigance is played by Matthew McConaughey.

Appears in:

Lucien Wilbanks

A close friend of Jake Brigance and an important supporting character in A Time to Kill, Wilbanks also appears alongside Harry Rex Vonner in The Last Juror and opposite both Brigance and Vonner in Sycamore Row. In the A Time to Kill film, Wilbanks is played by Donald Sutherland.

Appears in:

Harry Rex Vonner

A key supporting character in A Time to Kill and a close friend of Jake Brigance, also appearing opposite Brigance and Lucien Wilbanks in Sycamore Row. He also earlier appears alongside Wilbanks alone in The Last Juror and by himself as a minor character in The Summons and in the short story "Fish Files". In the film version of A Time to Kill Vonner is played by Oliver Platt.

Appears in:

Teddy Maynard

Head of the CIA in The Broker and The Brethren, portrayed as a physically frail but mentally alert manipulator who resorts to extralegal means to protect what he considers to be the national interest.

Appears in:

F. Denton Voyles

Head of the FBI. Played by Steven Hill in The Firm and James B. Sikking in The Pelican Brief.

Appears in:

Patton French

An extremely wealthy tort lawyer, riding around in his private jet plane.

Appears in:

Theodore Boone

The middle school aged only child of two lawyers, Theodore "Theo" Boone has a passion for the law and often uses his legal knowledge to help his schoolmates and others in his community. He even has a "practice" of his own, representing people in his local Animal Court. He appears as the main protagonist in the young adult Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer series.

Appears in:

Sebastian Rudd

Lacy Stoltz

Recurring themes

Dislike of mega law firms

Grisham's books show the writer's manifest dislike of mega law firms which employ hundreds of lawyers, cater to corporate clients, engage in intensive billing and let their young associates go through a "boot camp" of impossibly long (though well-paid) working hours, lured by the hope that a lucky few of them will eventually become partners. A grievance repeatedly made in Grisham novels is that many of the lawyers employed by such firms never get to see the inside of a courtroom; several Grisham characters strongly aver that such is not a worthy career for a lawyer.

A Grisham character employed by such a mega-firm would inevitably rebel and break away. In The Firm the protagonist discovers his firm to be involved with the Mafia and eventually steals a lot of Mafia money and runs away to the Caribbean, leaving the FBI with much incriminating evidence against the senior partners. In "The Pelican Brief" a character (not the protagonist) discovers outright criminal activity by his firm, turns whistle blower, and gets murdered - but his posthumous recorded testimony utterly destroys the firm.

In other books, where the mega-firm's practices are inhuman but not illegal, the protagonists break away to various more congenial if less well-paying employments. In The Associate the protagonist ends up in a small-town partnership with his lawyer father; in The Street Lawyer - in a legal clinic helping the homeless and indigents of Washington D.C.; and in The Litigators - in a rather hilarious involvement with two cranky ambulance chasers, and eventually opening his own office specializing in product liability.

This theme is fitly summarized in the parting words of the protagonist of The Associate, as he gladly gives up his job in the New York City-based Scully & Pershing, the world's largest law firm, and heads back to his hometown and a partnership in his father's law office. "The Editor of the Yale Law Journal - practicing law on Main Street in York, Pennsylvania? Sure! I have never been more serious! Real clients. Real people. Real cases. Deer hunting on Saturdays, Steelers on Sundays. A real life."

Escape to the Tropics

Many Grisham books end with the characters managing to lay their hands on considerable amounts of money and make off to the Tropics (usually, to the Caribbean). So do the protagonists of The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Racketeer, and "Fish Files" as well as a minor character in The Brethren (for whom it ends badly).

Though in many of the books the money financing such an Escape to the Tropics is obtained in shady or outrightly illegal ways, the characters doing it retain the reader's sympathy.

A variation on this theme is The Partner whose plot begins where other books ended: i.e. with such an escapee being apprehended (in Brazil in this case) and being hauled back to the US - where he ingeniously manages to wriggle out of all the many charges against him (but gets all his money stolen by a trusted confederate).

Bibliography

A complete listing of works by John Grisham[48]

Novels

A selection of John Grisham book covers.

Short stories

† Denotes books not in the legal genre

Non-fiction

Adaptations

Feature films

Television

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "John Grisham Biography". Ca.movies.yahoo.com. Archived from the original on 2013-12-21. Retrieved 2014-06-16.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 John Grisham's Biography Archived 2010-12-14 at the Wayback Machine.. Achievement.org; retrieved 2011-12-09.
  3. ↑ "Monitor". Entertainment Weekly (1245): 22. February 8, 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. Encyclopediaofarkansas.net; retrieved 2011-12-09.
  5. ↑ "John Grisham: E-Books will be half of my sales". CBS News. 2012-04-11. Retrieved 2013-12-23.
  6. ↑ "John Grisham Wins Galaxy Award", Writerswrite.com (2007-03-29); retrieved 2011-12-09.
  7. ↑ Motoko, Rich. "Record First-Day Sales for Last 'Harry Potter' Book". The New York Times. The New York Times. Retrieved 14 October 2018.
  8. ↑ "About 'The Firm'". NBC.com. Retrieved January 22, 2012.
  9. 1 2 "John Grisham by Mark Flanagan", About.com; retrieved December 9, 2011.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 John Grisham biography, Jgrisham.com; retrieved 2011-12-09.
  11. ↑ Norton, Will Jr. (October 3, 1994). "CONVERSATIONS: Why John Grisham Teaches Sunday School", Christianity Today. Vol. 38, No. 11
  12. 1 2 Grisham, John (September 6, 2010). "Boxers, Briefs and Books", The New York Times; accessed November 2, 2017.
  13. ↑ Miller, Erin Collazo Biography of John Grisham, Bestsellers.about.com (1955-02-08); retrieved 2011-12-09.
  14. ↑ Mississippi Official and Statistical Register. Secretary of State. 1989. p. 162.
  15. ↑ Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture; retrieved 2011-12-09.
  16. ↑ "Bestseller Books of the 1990s". About.com. Retrieved 2007-12-01.
  17. ↑ Library, Tulsa City-County. "Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award". helmerichaward.org. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  18. 1 2 Middleton, Christopher (2010-05-28). "Exclusive: best-selling author John Grisham explains why he's courting children with his latest legal thriller". London: telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-07-16.
  19. ↑ Rose, Charlie (October 13, 2006). "An hour with author John Grisham". Charlie Rose. Archived from the original on January 27, 2013.
  20. ↑ Maslin, Janet (2017-05-31). "Plot Twist! John Grisham's New Thriller Is Positively Lawyerless". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  21. ↑ Media, John O’Neill For Digital First. "John Grisham pens another exciting legal drama with 'The Rooster Bar'". News-Herald. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  22. ↑ Viera, Mark (5 June 2010). "Virginia Baseball Team Back in Business". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  23. ↑ Murray, Jocelyn. "Top 10 Best Beaches on the Gulf Coast USA". Tots and Travel. Retrieved January 14, 2016.
  24. ↑ Gibson, Dale (2008-07-07). "John Grisham and wife buy home in Chapel Hill". Triangle Business Journal. Retrieved 2009-09-16.
  25. ↑ "Novelist John Grisham Says Church Politicking Hurts Baptist Image". Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
  26. ↑ Walden, Celia (January 26, 2015). "John Grisham: My sex scenes make my wife laugh out loud", The Telegraph; retrieved July 16, 2016.
  27. ↑ "Diamond Solitarie". baltimoresun.com. May 1, 2000. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  28. ↑ https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/photo/2016/02/09/night-sports-february-9-photo-essay#14
  29. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/sports/06virginia.html
  30. ↑ "About Us: Board of Directors". The Innocence Project. Archived from the original on 2007-02-17. Retrieved 2014-06-16.
  31. ↑ "Innocence Blog: John Grisham Calls for Forensic Improvement". Innocenceproject.org. 2011-12-08. Archived from the original on 2012-03-10. Retrieved 2014-06-16.
  32. ↑ "Innocence Blog: John Grisham discusses wrongful convictions tonight on Dateline NBC". Innocenceproject. 2007-05-22. Archived from the original on 2010-07-06. Retrieved 2014-06-16.
  33. ↑ "Bill Moyers Journal". PBS. Retrieved 2014-06-16.
  34. ↑ Grisham, John (2013-08-10). "After Guantánamo, Another Injustice". The New York Times.
  35. ↑ "{title}". Archived from the original on 2016-03-12. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  36. ↑ "John Grisham on Grappling with Race, the Death Penalty; and Lawyers 'Polluting Their Own Profession'".
  37. ↑ Crawford, Melanie L. "A Losing Battle With The 'Machinery Of Death': The Flaws Of Virginia's Death Penalty Laws And Clemency Process Highlighted By The Fate Of Teresa Lewis." Widener Law Review 18.1 (2012): pp. 71–98. Academic Search Complete.
  38. ↑ John Grisham (September 12, 2010). "Why is Teresa Lewis on Death Row?", The Washington Post, pg. B-5
  39. ↑ Foster, Peter (15 October 2014). "John Grisham: men who watch child porn are not all paedophiles". The Telegraph. Retrieved October 20, 2014.
  40. ↑ Robehmed, Natalie. "Millionaire Author John Grisham Says Not All Men Who Watch Child Porn Are Pedophiles".
  41. ↑ "John Grisham apologizes for child pornography comments". CBS News.
  42. ↑ "The John Grisham Room » Mississippi State University Libraries". library.msstate.edu.
  43. ↑ "John Grisham Room now open in library". Mississippi State University. Retrieved 2007-12-01.
  44. ↑ "John Grisham, Morgan Freeman, others call for change to Mississippi flag". CNN. 2015-08-15. Retrieved 2015-09-07.
  45. ↑ "John Grisham: Why Mississippi Will Pull Down the Confederate Flag". Time magazine. 2015-08-16. Retrieved 2015-09-11.
  46. ↑ "John Grisham Wins First Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction".
  47. ↑ Law, University of Alabama School of. "Archive 2014 - The University of Alabama - School of Law". law.ua.edu. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  48. ↑ "John Grisham books".
  49. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 John Grisham Movies. Jgrisham.com. Retrieved on 2011-12-09.
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