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John Grisham

American writer and lawyer (born 1955)

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Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. He practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it. It was later adapted into the 1996 feature film of the same name. Grisham's first bestseller, The Firm, sold more than seven million copies, and was also adapted into a 1993 feature film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise, and a 2012 TV series that continues the story ten years after the events of the film and novel. Seven 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, and Skipping Christmas.

Early life

Grisham, the second of five children, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham. His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker. When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee. As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player. As noted in the foreword to Calico Joe, Grisham gave up playing baseball at the age of 18, after a game in which a pitcher aimed a beanball at him and narrowly missed doing the young Grisham grave harm.

Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college. He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House. Grisham started working for a plant nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $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".

Initially, Grisham attended Horn Lake High School, a school that was so overcrowded some classes met in a church or a gymnasium. In 1971, he transferred to Southaven High School, where he played football, basketball, and baseball. He credits his 12th grade English teacher, Frances McGuffey, for inspiring his love for reading and for introducing him to the works of John Steinbeck in particular.

Through one of his father's contacts, Grisham 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 sales clerk 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, deciding instead to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.

Grisham attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi, where he hoped to launch his baseball career but was benched instead. He and two close friends, Bubba Logan and Parker Pickle, transferred to Delta State University in Cleveland where Grisham hoped to revive his baseball career as a walk on player, but he was cut from the team and he left school after one semester. Ultimately, Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree. Although he started there as an economics major, he eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science in accounting after being inspired by a fellow student, a Vietnam veteran, who planned to go to law school. He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law intending to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.

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