John Grisham: From Aspiring Baseball Player to Best-Selling Author and Philanthropist
John Grisham is an American writer, lawyer, and former politician, known for his best-selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide.
Early Life and Education
John Grisham was born on February 8, 1955, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to John Grisham and Wanda Skidmore Grisham. At the time, his parents were helping the extended family on the cotton farm near Black Oak (Craighead County). His father, a cotton farmer and itinerant construction worker, moved the family frequently, from town to town throughout the Deep South, settling in Southaven, Mississippi in 1967. By his own account, John Grisham had no interest in writing until after he embarked on his professional career.
Grisham's parents did not have the benefit of college, but they always emphasized its importance to their children. They worked very hard to pay for it, and to provide it for all of five kids. He attended three different colleges before earning a degree. For his first two years in college, he drifted. He attended Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi, where he hoped to launch his baseball career but was benched instead. He and two close friends 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. After abandoning a youthful dream of a professional baseball career, he settled down to study accounting and prepare for a career as a tax lawyer.
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.
Early Career and Political Involvement
After graduating from law school and passing the bar exam in 1981, Grisham married Renee Jones, a childhood friend from Southaven, and they returned to their hometown where he became a litigator. Grisham was admitted to the state bar in Mississippi in 1981 and practiced in Southaven until 1990. He practiced law for about a decade and won election as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives, serving from 1983 to 1990. He challenged the incumbent after becoming embarrassed by Mississippi's national reputation and inspired by the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1982. Grisham represented the 7th District, which included DeSoto County, Mississippi. By his second term in the state legislature, he was the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee and a member of several other committees.
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The Birth of a Novelist
Inspired by a case he observed in a Mississippi courthouse, Grisham decided to write a novel. In Mississippi, attorneys in private practice are sometimes called upon to appear as public defenders for indigent clients. In this way, Grisham received invaluable experience of the criminal justice system.
In 1984, Grisham dropped by the courthouse to observe a trial. “This ten-year-old girl was testifying against a man who had raped her and left her for dead,” he says. “I never felt such emotion and human drama in my life. I became obsessed wondering what it would be like if the girl’s father killed that rapist and was put on trial. I had to write it down.”
For years, he arrived at his office at five o’clock in the morning, six days a week, to work on his first book, A Time To Kill. It took three years to write it, and he was very disciplined about doing it. It was very much a hobby. By the time he finished it, he had developed a routine of writing every day.
His manuscript was rejected by 28 publishers before he found an unknown publisher who was willing to print a short run. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, The Firm.
Literary Success
Although A Time to Kill only 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. The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller and the second novel by John Grisham.
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At age 36, his career as a novelist bloomed when movie rights to The Firm were sold for a hefty price, even before the book had found a publisher. The Firm sold more than seven million copies and spent 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. With the success of The Firm, John Grisham finally gave up his law practice to write full-time.
He has returned to the practice of law on only one occasion since, in 1996, to win a settlement for the family of a railroad worker killed on the job. Meanwhile, he has continued to write enormously successful legal thrillers at the rate of nearly one a year.
Exploring New Genres
Beginning in 2001, Grisham has occasionally departed from the format of the legal thriller to write works of fiction on other subjects, particularly baseball and life in the rural South. The first of these was A Painted House, followed by Skipping Christmas, Bleachers and Playing for Pizza. His 2009 book of short stories, Ford County, returned to the setting of his first novel. In 2010, Grisham started writing a series of legal thrillers for children. They feature Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old who gives his classmates legal advice on a multitude of scenarios, ranging from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed.
Adaptations and Recurring Themes
Nine of Grisham’s tales have been adapted for film and television, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Rainmaker, along with his original screenplay The Gingerbread Man.
Several of Grisham's legal thrillers are set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, located in the 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, The Reckoning, A Time for Mercy 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 Partner, The Runaway Jury, and The Boys from Biloxi are set in Biloxi, and large portions of The Pelican Brief in New Orleans.
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Philanthropy
John Grisham and his wife Renee do their grantmaking through the Oakwood Foundation Charitable Trust, which has given away between $2 and $4.5 million annually in recent years. The couple’s philanthropy prioritizes Mississippi and Virginia.
Grisham has given his alma mater Mississippi State University millions. Grisham’s law school Ole Miss, meanwhile, is home to the Grisham Writers in Residence.
From some of the books that Grisham has written, to his experiences as a lawyer, it is clear that improving the justice system is important to him. Indeed, Grisham even took time off from writing for several months to return to the courtroom to honor a commitment prior to switching careers. Grisham sits on the board of directors of the Innocence Project, which campaigns to free unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence. He and Renee steadily support the organization, as well as organizations like Legal Aid and Justice Center in Virginia and Southern Environmental Law Center.
Last decade, Grisham and his wife Renee set up the Rebuild the Coast Fund, which raised $8.8 million dollars for Gulf Coast relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Grishams donated $5 million toward that effort. Grisham has also given support to various human services outfits, especially in Mississippi and Virginia. United Way, Charlottesville Free Clinic, and Planned Parenthood have all seen support.
Grisham is Christian, and he has supported a number of churches, Baptist churches specifically, including Cove Presbyterian Church, Crozet Baptist Church, and University Baptist Church.
Personal Life and Interests
Today, John Grisham and his wife, Renee Jones, keep homes in Oxford, Mississippi and near Charlottesville, Virginia. Grisham married Renee Jones on May 8, 1981.
He also keeps up with his greatest passion: baseball. The man who dreamed of being a professional baseball player now serves as the local Little League commissioner. Grisham’s nonfiction book, The Innocent Man recounted the real-life case of Ron Williamson, a former professional baseball player sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit.
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