John Grisham

John Ray Grisham Jr. (born February 8, 1955) is an American novelist, lawyer, and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, 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.

Along with Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.

He eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science in accounting.

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.

Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981.

He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.

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.

He practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990.

Grisham practiced law for about a decade and won election as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives, serving from 1983 to 1990.

He supported Representative Ed Perry's unsuccessful bid for the House speakership in 1987.

With a different speaker elected at the beginning of the 1988 legislative session, Grisham was out of favor with the new legislative leaders and assigned to more minor committee roles.

Not as busy with political affairs, he devoted more time to his novel, The Firm.

Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it.

Grisham's first bestseller, The Firm, sold more than seven million copies, and was also adapted into a 1993 feature film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise, and a 2012 TV series that continues the story ten years after the events of the film and novel.

Seven of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas.

Grisham, the second of five children, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham.

His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker.

When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee.

As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player.

As noted in the foreword to Calico Joe, Grisham gave up playing baseball at the age of 18, after a game in which a pitcher aimed a beanball at him, and narrowly missed, doing the young Grisham grave harm.

Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college.

He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.

Grisham started working for a plant nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for $1.00 an hour.

He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour.

He wrote about the job: "there was no future in it".

At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work".

Through one of his father's contacts, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at age 17.

It was during this time that an unfortunate incident got him "serious" about college.

A fight with gunfire broke out among the crew, causing Grisham to run to a nearby restroom to find safety.

He did not come out until after the police had detained the perpetrators.

He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college.

His next work was in retail, as a sales clerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating".

By this time, Grisham was halfway through college.

Planning to become a tax lawyer, he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it, deciding instead to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.

He attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi, and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland.

Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree.

It was later adapted into the 1996 feature film of the same name.