John Grisham

He wed Renee Jones on May 8, 1981 and they have two children. In their spare time, the family moves between their homes in Oxford, Mississippi and their other home in Charlottesville, Virgina.

He is one of the Board of Directors of the ‘The Innocence Project’, which is a project involved in acquitting convicts who were unfairly sentenced on the basis of DNA tests.

There is a ‘John Grisham Room’ in the Mississippi State University, which houses all the materials written by Grisham.

John Ray Grisham, Jr. was the second of the five children born to John Grisham and Wanda Grisham, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The family settled in DeSoto County, Mississippi, when he was just four years old.

He initially wanted to become a baseball player but his dreams soon changed when he began focusing on his education, while attending Northwest Mississippi Community college.

As a teenager, he worked a number of odd jobs including watering bushes, working with the asphalt crew and working as a salesclerk in a departmental store. All these jobs drove him to a point of ‘lunacy’, which is when he decided that he would pursue his college education seriously.

He then shifted to Delta State University but finally graduated from Mississippi State University, with a BS in Accounting, in 1977.

After his graduation, he studied civil litigation at the University Of Mississippi School Of Law and graduated with a JD degree, in 1983.

He practiced law for a decade and was also elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat, in 1983. He was a member of the Mississippi state legislature from 1983 to 1990. He served as the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committeee, and was a member of several other committees.

In 1984, an incident involving the rape of a 12-year-old girl inspired him to write his first novel, ‘Time to Kill’, which took three years to complete.

Once the novel was complete, Grisham had a difficult time to find publishers. ‘Wynwood Press’ finally published his work in June, 1989. Right after his novel was published, he began working on his second novel, ‘The Firm’, which was published two years later.

From 1992 to 1998, he published a series of best-selling novels such as ‘The Pelican Brief’, ‘The Client’, ‘The Chamber’, ‘The Rainmaker’, ‘The Runaway Jury’, ‘The Partner’ and ‘The Street Lawyer’ in the order.

Starting with the new millennium, in 2001, he diverged from the legal genre and authored ‘A Painted House’ and ‘Skipping Christmas’ the same year. In the next two years, he authored, ‘The Summons’, ‘The King of Torts’ and ‘Bleachers’.

His first best-seller, ‘The Firm’, released in 1991 and sold over than seven million copies worldwide. It became the first best-seller of the year 1991 and is known as his most widely-recognized novel. The book was adapted for a feature film of the same title, starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. It was also adapted for television in 2011. Many of his novels have been translated in 29 languages.

In 1993, his third novel, ‘The Pelican Brief’ became an international best-seller. A film adaptation of the same was released the same year starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts.

His fourth novel, ‘The Client’, which was published in 1993, earned him widespread acclaim. The novel became so successful that it was adapted for film the very next year, starring Susan Sarandon. The film also became a huge hit, which went on to spawn a television series that ran from 1995 to 1995.