Born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn't have the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in accounting at Mississippi State University. After graduating from law school at Ole Miss in 1981, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade in Southaven, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation.
That might have put an end to Grisham's hobby. However, he had already begun his next book, and it would quickly turn that hobby into a new full-time career—and spark one of publishing's greatest success stories. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared. When he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures for $600,000, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among publishers, and book rights were bought by Doubleday. Spending 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991.
John Grisham was born on Feb. 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
His father was a cotton farmer and construction worker and his mother was a homemaker.
Grisham spent the first seven years of his life on a very unsuccessful cotton farm, which his family fled in the middle of the night: "It was the best move of my life to get off the farm," Grisham said in a 2018 radio interview.
Grisham went to law school thinking he'd study tax law, but he found that he enjoyed performing in a courtroom. He ended up becoming a criminal defense and personal injury lawyer in Southaven, Mississippi.
His experiences in court would become the inspiration for his hugely successful legal thrillers: "I seriously doubt I would have ever written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial."
Grisham's first book, A Time to Kill, was written after hearing the testimony of a young rape victim. The book is about a father who seeks vengeance against the men who attacked his daughter.
The manuscript for A Time to Kill was rejected 28 times, but was eventually picked up by a small publisher called Wynwood Press.
Sales for A Time to Kill were so bad that Grisham bought 1,000 copies and tried to sell them himself. He decided to finish writing his second book, The Firm, and see where it got him.
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