The Arkansas-born, Mississippi-raised author has been one of America’s most successful authors over the past two decades.

After playing on the Mississippi State University baseball team and receiving his undergrad degree, Grisham, 52, went on to law school at Ole Miss, graduating in 1981. He was a practicing attorney for about ten years and also served in the Mississippi legislature. In 1984, he began a course that would forever change his life, while also changing the way that literary writers craft their works in order to make a smooth transition to a Hollywood screenplay.

After hearing the testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim in a DeSoto County (Miss.) courthouse, Grisham was inspired to begin a novel with the story line of what would happen if the girl’s father murdered her assailants. Writing in the mornings before work and sometimes during court recesses, Grisham finished A Time To Kill in 1987, and it was self-published a year later. The day after he completed his novel, he immediately began work on a story about a young attorney that gets hired by a not-so-perfect law firm. Paramount Pictures bought the rights to The Firm for $600,000, and Grisham became a hot commodity. The novel spent 47 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and became the best-selling novel of 1991.

Since his debut, Grisham has turned out one work a year with titles including The Pelican Brief, The Client and The Runaway Jury. With the success of his novels and films, Grisham became the bestselling author of the ‘90s. There are currently 225 million Grisham novels in print worldwide; and nine novels have seen the big screen.

Through Grisham’s works, the world has been educated on the Southern landscape, with the setting playing a key role in each novel or movie. People now travel to Memphis, Tenn., to see the alley where Tom Cruise jumped from the Cotton Exchange building onto a cotton truck in The Firm. Cities like Canton, Miss., Biloxi, Miss., and New Orleans have all been well-represented in Grisham’s books.

Grisham is also quite a philanthropist, with cities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast benefiting from his Rebuild the Coast Fund, which has raised $8.8 million for Hurricane Katrina relief. His lifelong passion is baseball, and he’s served as a little league baseball commissioner and has multiple little league baseball fields built on his property. The writer currently splits his time between homes in North Garden, Va., and Oxford, Miss.

by Keith Sisson

Tennessee Williams	Ellen Gilchrist	John Grisham	Margaret Walker Alexander
Clifton Taulbert	Eudora Welty	Richard Wright	Shelby Foote
Jimmy Buffett	Greg Iles	William Faulkner	Jill Conner Browne
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