John Grisham

John Grisham' is a best-selling American thriller writer who was born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction worker. As a child he aspired to being a professional baseball player, though he soon realized that that could never be a reality and so majored in Accounting in Mississippi State University, he graduated from law school in 1981 from Ole Miss.

He practiced law for close to a decade in Southaven. His speciality was criminal defense and personal jury litigation. He was also elected to the House of Representatives and he served until the year 1990. File:Http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/09/26/people.grisham.ap/story.grisham.jpg

Early Works

While in the DeSoto Courthouse, Grisham heard the testimony of a 12 year old who had been raped, this inspired him to write a novel about what could have happened had the girl's father murdered her attackers. He had to get up every morning at roughly 5.00 A.M to write for several hours. This work matured into, "A Time to Kill," his first work. This took him 3 years, finishing in 1987. At first it was rejected by several publishers but Wynwood Press eventually printed it, starting at 5,000 copies. It was published in 1988.

His next novel, which was started the day after Grisham completed "A Time To Kill." This next novel was one of his most popular, "the Firm." The rights were sold to Paramount Pictures for $600,000, launching Grisham into the ranks of the most-wanted authors of the world. The book rights were subsequently bought by Doubleday. "The Firm" spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and it became the bestselling novel of 1991.

The success of his next few novels, "The Pelican Brief" and "The Client" included, meant he was now securely placed in the ranks of authors all over the world as one the most popular legal thriller writers.

Works As A Famous Author

Since publishing, "A Time to Kill," Grisham averaged at a novel a year. All of these novels have been international bestsellers, and currently there are roughly 225 million of his novels in print in 29 languages. Nine of these have been turned into movies, such as "The Firm" and "The Runaway Jury." He also wrote "The Innocent Man," which marks his first journey into the realm of non-fiction.

Family & Life

Grisham lives with his wife, Renee, and his two children Ty and Shea, they live in their Victorian home on a farm in Mississippi and a plantation near Charlottesville, VA.

When not writing he works for charitable causes. He has done much work for the "Rebuild The Coast Fund" which raised 8.8 million for Gulf Coast relief after the travesty of Hurricane Katrina.

He still keeps up with his childhood passion of baseball, and is now a local Little League Commissioner, and has built six ballfields on his property which hosts 350 kids and 26 Little League teams.