Biography
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 #1 fiction bestsellers; his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors who have sold 2 million copies on the first printing.
Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. He practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990.
Biography
Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it. It was later adapted into the 1996 feature film of the same name.
His first bestseller, The Firm, sold more than 7 million copies, and was also adapted into a 1993 feature film 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.
The second of five children, Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda and John Ray Grisham. His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker. When Grisham was 4, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee.
As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player but gave up the game at 18 when a pitcher aimed a beanball at him and narrowly missed.
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.
Biography
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, he took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work."
Initially, Grisham attended Horn Lake High School, so overcrowded some classes met in a church or a gymnasium. In 1971, he transferred to Southaven High School, where he credits his 12th grade English teacher, Frances McGuffey, for inspiring his love for reading and for introducing him to the works of John Steinbeck in particular.
Through one of his father's contacts, Grisham 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.
Biography
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.
Grisham attended Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi, where he hoped to launch his baseball career but was benched instead. He and two close friends transferred to Delta State University in Cleveland where Grisham hoped to revive his baseball career but was cut from the team and left school after one semester.
Ultimately, Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree. Although he started as an economics major, he eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science in accounting after being inspired by a fellow student, a Vietnam veteran, who planned to go to law school.
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. He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.
Biography
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 challenged the incumbent after becoming embarrassed by Mississippi's national reputation and inspired by the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1982.
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. Not as busy with political affairs, he devoted more time to his novel, The Firm. Grisham later reflected that if Perry had become speaker he might have been given more committee responsibilities and thus unable to write.
Grisham's writing career blossomed with the success of his second book, The Firm, and he gave up practicing law, except for returning briefly in 1996 to represent the family of a railroad worker who was killed on the job. His official website states: "He was honoring a commitment made before he had retired from the law to become a full-time writer. Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500 — the biggest verdict of his career."
Biography
Although he failed English in community college, Grisham received praise for his writing while taking a business correspondence course during law school. Grisham said a case that inspired his first novel came in 1984 when he heard a 12-year-old girl telling a jury what had happened to her. He saw how members of the jury cried as she told them about being raped and beaten. "I remember staring at the defendant and wishing I had a gun." It was then, Grisham later wrote in The New York Times, that a story was born. Over the next three years, he wrote his first book, A Time to Kill. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000 copy printing. It was published in June 1988.
The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, The Firm. It was a New York Times best seller for 47 weeks, and became the 7th bestselling novel of 1991. This began a streak lasting for nearly the next two decades when he had one of the top 10 best selling novels of the year. In 1992 and 1993 he had the second-bestselling book of the year with The Pelican Brief and The Client, and from 1994 to 2000 he had the number one bestselling book every year.
In 2001 Grisham did not have the bestselling book of the year, but had both the second and third books on the list with Skipping Christmas and A Painted House.
Biography
In 1992, The Firm was made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Ed Harris; released in June 1993, it grossed $270 million. The film version of The Pelican Brief starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington was released later that year and grossed $195 million.
Following their success, Regency Enterprises paid Grisham $2.25 million for the rights to The Client released in 1994 starring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones. Universal Pictures then commissioned Grisham with the highest amount ever for an unpublished novel, paying $3.75 million for the rights to The Chamber. In August 1994, New Regency paid a record $6 million for the rights to A Time to Kill, with Grisham asking for a guarantee that Joel Schumacher, the director of The Client, would direct.
In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
In 2010, Grisham started writing a series of legal thrillers for children. They feature Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old who gives his classmates legal advice on a multitude of scenarios, ranging from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed. He said, "I'm hoping primarily to entertain and interest kids, but at the same time I'm quietly hoping that the books will inform them, in a subtle way, about law."
Biography
He also stated that it was his daughter, Shea, who inspired him to write the Theodore Boone series.
"My daughter Shea is a teacher in North Carolina and when she got her fifth grade students to read the book, three or four of them came up afterwards and said they'd like to go into the legal profession."
In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book, and his favorite author is John le Carré. In 2011 and 2012, his novels The Litigators and The Racketeer claimed the top spot in The New York Times best seller list.
In 2017, Grisham released two legal thrillers. Camino Island was published on June 6, 2017, making the top of several best seller lists including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. The Rooster Bar, published on October 24, 2017, was called "his most original work yet," and a “buoyant, mischievous thriller” in The New York Times.
Several of Grisham's legal thrillers are set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, in the equally fictional Ford County, a northwest Mississippi town still deeply divided by racism.
Grisham owns a beachfront home on Amelia Island in Florida.
Biography
He is a member of the board of directors of the Innocence Project, which campaigns to free and exonerate unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence. The Innocence Project contends that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Grisham has testified before Congress on behalf of the Innocence Project.
He believes that prison rates in the US are excessive, and the justice system is "locking up far too many people." Citing examples including "black teenagers on minor drugs charges" to "those who had viewed child porn online," he controversially added that he believed not all viewers of child pornography are necessarily pedophiles. After hearing from numerous people against this position, he later recanted this statement in a Facebook post. He went on to clarify that he was defending a former friend from law school who was caught in a sting thinking he was looking at adult porn but it was in reality 16 and 17 year-old minors.
See his website for a complete list of publications: https://jgrisham.com/
The Widow, his next novel, will be out in October 2025.
Publications
Camino Island (2017)
Camino Island is a crime fiction thriller written by John Grisham and released on June 6, 2017. The book is a departure from Grisham's legal thrillers and focuses on stolen rare books. The book begins with the theft of five rare F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from the Firestone Library at Princeton University and then embarks on a journey to a resort town on a Florida island in search of clues about the heist. Although the FBI and an "underground agency" of investigators working for Princeton's insurance company pursue the perpetrators in the black market, the story focuses on a novelist who becomes involved in the search and pursues an investigation of the heist. Background
Grisham conceived of the subject with his wife on a lengthy road trip to Florida when they discussed a work incorporating "stolen books, stolen manuscripts, bookstores, [and] booksellers". In February 2017, Doubleday books announced that Grisham would publish a crime heist novel in June in addition to his usual fall legal thriller. Publicity for the book included Grisham's first major book tour in 25 years.
Publications
Camino Winds (2020)
Camino Winds is set against the backdrop of a hurricane in the fictional resort town of Camino Island, Florida. The narrative unfolds around the murder of Nelson Kerr, a friend of the protagonist, Bruce Cable, who owns a local bookstore.
Bruce Cable's life takes a dramatic turn when his friend Nelson Kerr is found dead amidst the chaos of a hurricane. Initially deemed a casualty of the storm, it soon becomes clear that the truth behind Nelson's death is far more sinister. As Bruce begins to investigate, he unravels a web of secrets and motives, finding that the tranquil Camino Island holds more danger and intrigue than he could have imagined.
Publications
Framed (2024)
AMZ:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The master of the legal thriller” teams up with “the godfather of the innocence movement” to share ten harrowing true stories of wrongful convictions.
“Gripping . . . compelling . . . What makes [Framed] important reading is the exposure of the infuriating, recurrent factors involved in so many unrighteous convictions.”—The Washington Post
Known worldwide for his bestselling novels, it is Grisham's real-life passion for justice that led to his work with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, the first organization dedicated to exonerating innocent people who have been wrongly convicted.
A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty, there is little room to prove doubt. These ten true stories shed light on Americans who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, Grisham and McCloskey take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and corruption in the courts that can make them so hard to reverse.
Don’t miss John Grisham’s upcoming novel, The Widow!
Cast of characters
Mercer Mann:
Novelist and professor at Ole Miss, she marries Thomas, her partner of three years, on the beach, in the opening chapter of the novel. Bruce, the bookstore owner, officiates.
"Mercer taught because she needed a salary. She had published a collection of short stories and two novels. She was searching for a third. Her last one, Tessa, had been a bestseller, and its success had prompted Viking Press to give her a two-book contract. Her editor at Viking was still waiting for the next story idea. So was Mercer." (p. 2)
Bruce gives her a copy of A Dark History of Dark Isle, a self-published memoir written by Lovely Jackson, the last living heir to Dark Island, or so she claims in the book. Mercer reads it on her honeymoon:
Mercer was expecting a simple writing style. Easy words of no more than three syllables. Short, direct sentences, only a few commas. Certainly no literary flourishes. However, the writing was easy to read, and the story so compelling that Mercer quickly set aside her rather snotty editorial and professorial thoughts and got lost in it. When she finished the first chapter without a break, she realized that the writing was far more effective and engrossing than most of the stuff she was forced to read from her students. Indeed, the writing and storytelling were more interesting than most of the hyped debut novels she’d read in the past year. (p. 13)
Cast of characters
Lovely Jackson:
Bruce carries several copies of her self-published book, The Dark History of the Dark Isle, although it doesn't sell well—only 27 copies. In that book, she claims that she was born on Dark Isle, a barrier island off the coast of north Florida, in 1940, and that she and her mother left when she was 15 .
Several generations of her family have lived there, are buried there, ever since one of her great grandmothers, Nalla, was captured by a slave trader in Africa and transported on the ship Venus (actually was a slave ship Venus) to America. In bad weather, the ship sank, but her grandmother survived, and made it to shore on Dark Isle, free.
Lovely's family has lived on that island since, several generations, leaving only when her mother could no longer care for herself. But Lovely continued to visit, and care for the graves. And she attempted to pay property taxes every year, although they were returned.
She's suing to claim ownership of the island, ever since a corporate developer, Tidal Breeze, made plans to develop a resort and casino, Panther Cay, or her family's sacred island.
Cast of characters
Nalla: Lovely's original ancestor/grandmother
Member of the Luba tribe who lived in a village in the southern part of the Kingdom of Kongo, Africa. She and her husband, Mosi, had one child, a three-year-old boy.
When she was 19, slave traders raided the village; she was captured, shackled, and transported to Florida, which at the time was Spanish territory. She was raped by Monk on the ship, lands on the island pregnant. When he arrives, she and men on the island kill him; she pours his blood on the beach, and lays a curse on all white men who come ashore.
There are continuous reports of curses, men killed, who ventured onto Dark Isle. Bruce reports on that occurred in 1933 during the Depression when 2 grad students went to the island as a WPA project to record the oral histories of surviving slaves; there were a few still on the island. The grad students never returned.
Nor did a team of four tough guys who’d once served in the army’s Special Forces, sent ashore to find the remains of any settlement, before bulldozing the island. They heard a panther or bobcat, found rattlesnakes, but a flesh-eating bacteria killed them all.
Cast of characters—Bruce
Steven Mahon: A retired attorney who defends Lovely's claim in court
"He had failed twice at retirement. For most of his illustrious career he was a top litigator for the Sierra Club and led assaults against all manner of environmental pollution and destruction. The lawsuits were long and brutal and after thirty years he burned out and retired to a small family farm in Vermont. There he lasted one winter, snowbound and bored, until his wife sent him to Boston to find work. He got a job with a small nonprofit, sued a few chemical companies, and survived a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. His wife was from Oregon, couldn’t handle snow, and decided they needed sunshine.
They moved to Santa Rosa and bought a beautiful Victorian three blocks off Main Street. He founded the Barrier Island Legal Defense Fund, an aggressive-sounding outfit that consisted of himself and a part-time secretary crammed together in a tiny office above a dress shop, across the street from Bay Books." (pp. 41-42)
He's writing a book (sort of), " . . . his memoir, his war stories, his greatest hits in taking on wolf poachers in Montana, nuclear waste leakers in New Mexico, coal strip miners in Kentucky, and Miami cruise operators who dumped tons of garbage in the ocean. . . . Steven was a fine raconteur and a good writer as well, but the book required discipline. The author disliked desks and computer screens." (p.42)
Cast of characters—Bruce
Bruce Cable:
Owner of Bay Books bookstore, who often involves himself in helping local authors. Known for his literary connections, he's also a recurring character in the Camino Island series. Noteworthy: he supports local, little known authors, as well as recognized names. Wife Noelle is an antiques dealer, specializing in French Provincial
Gifford, a best-selling author and friend of Bruce, joins him in exposing Tidal Breeze
Judge Salazar: original judge in Lovely's case
She illegally discusses the case with Steven off the record, and after their conversation, Steven realizes that her mindset favors development. He suspects that Tidal Breeze secretly owns a new condo development named Old Dunes, where Judge Salazar’s son works as a mechanic. Gifford and Bruce devise a plan to reveal the owner of Old Dunes and achieve it through a lawsuit. Steven warns Judge Salazar about her conflict of interest, forcing her to resign from the case.
Cast of characters
Diane Krug:
Steven Mahon's paralegal, who is crucial in uncovering evidence and helping with the legal battle.
She puts together an archeological team to search for the remains of Lovely's ancestors on Dark Isle. Lovely goes along, and lifts the curse. The team finds bones but DNA cannot support her ancestral claim.
After Lovely wins the court case, Diane establishes the Nalla foundation to preserve Dark Isle and erect a memorial honoring those who were enslaved. Mercer writes and publishes The Passage to considerable acclaim. Lovely goes on tour with her but her health deteriorates. After she dies, they bury her ashes on Dark Isle, secretly, so that she can re-join her family.
Tidal Breeze:
The corporate developer who wants to build a resort and casino on Dark Isle, becoming the antagonist in the story.
Questions for discussion
What's Grisham's position on environmental issues and development/?
Questions for discussion
But Camino Ghosts also has some characteristics of the mystery genre, and more importantly the historical novel. How well do these elements work together in this novel?
Questions for discussion
The plot has an interesting structure as well. One reviewer commented that it actually has 2 subplots; one focuses on Mercer Mann and the book she's been struggling to write, but another is Lovely's story of Dark Isle. How do these two plots operate within the novel?
Questions for discussion
As a legal thriller, this novel has to be concerned with the legal arguments. How do these work in this novel? How does the courtroom scene function?
Questions for discussion
Were you satisfied with the ending?