John Grisham

John Grisham has tapped into a rich resource of material to create his sprawling southern novels. The realm of the legal courts, with its secrecy, its obscurity and its power, has served novelists looking for an intriguing setting all the way back to Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. While the courtrooms and laws have changed since Dickens’ time, their remaining ability to shape our lives in the most fundamental ways leaves them with literary potency. John Grisham has taken the modern dilemmas presented to us by our complicated and sometimes flawed legal system and made them the locomotion for his highly popular, genre-defining legal thrillers.

John Grisham had plenty of opportunity to observe the moral gaps and human drama present in the system. Perhaps it was his eye for a story, but whatever the reason, Grisham quickly drifted from accounting law to criminal law while at Mississippi State University. He credits his successful entry into life as a novelist to his voracious reading appetite as a child—an interest he luckily maintained into adulthood. Exploring different issues about power, and pitting an individual against a system, Grisham novels carry the added weight of the thick history and culture of the south.

While Grisham’s first novel was A Time to Kill, it was his second novel—in manuscript form no less—The Firm, which would attract Hollywood attention (Tom Cruise starred) and push his name to the top of publishers’ lists. To date Grisham has writing credits for over a dozen films, with many of his books likely to yield film adaptations in the future.

While best known for his stories of protagonists struggling valiantly against the legal system for either their survival or to accomplish what must be done, Grisham has also written novels relating to the life of the layperson in the south. His other great passion is baseball. He tried and failed to become a professional player, but puts considerable effort into supporting little league ball. John Grisham is married with two children.